Emily Montgomery

We must feature the arresting, lovely piece "Something Beautiful" by Emily Montgomery in Rattle, issue 43, Spring 2014. It has an indelible feeling and image of the far East, of the tropics and the ancient beauty of Asia. It really reminds me of Tagore, the famous Bengali poet.

Here's an excerpt, this is a great part:

I wanted to save something beautiful for you.

The last three jewels of glistening pomegranate

balanced in the palm of my hand before I ate them.

The morning birdsong in [...]

John Poch

I knew we had to recommend this poem as I read it--the great piece "The Difference at Cafe D'Arthe" by John Poch in Rattle, issue 43, Spring 2014. This type of poem shows it's intelligent in small luring movements, drawing you in until it explodes in incredible moments. For example, it begins with an excellent line and a epigram/beginning notation:

Seville, Spain

Except for coffee, light never forgives the dark.
[...]

Here, at the bar, even a driver of dangerous liquids

can find a robust, fertile rest so river deep,

his gaze darkens [...]

Then the poem continues on, swirling like Andrei Codrescu's infamous descriptions of NOLA until it gets to an incredible ending section that is excellent:

[...]

This one’s lover must be rough, her hair the scent

of a midnight sea-port, her love-talk

a dirty old story of graffiti on graffiti.

When she dances for him some nights, she must look like

the aftermath of math. The answer, naked

and not wanting. [...]

Film reads

Two great blogs to read for film lovers are:

MUBI Notepad: The well known site for film lovers has a great, really fun and varied blog, with tons of articles. For example, there's a great early Christopher Nolan and Batman film discussion here, which is really quite interesting despite the fact that it's, in a nominal sense, critical. If you step away from the sense of 'enjoying' a film and try to enjoy a discussion of it's dissection, this is for you. Critical verbosity is so fun to read, if you're in the mood.

Rouge: The great online journal has tons of interesting pieces, like a mysterious, appropriately post-modern one about the famous, classic 1961 French film Marienbad. Here's a great article about how many disparate films have the same rooms and locations, creating a strange shared universe.

Recs for children's books

If you need to give small children gifts, consider giving books and sweets. They make a great combo!

Here are some ideas: a definite must is the old world style of Winnie the Pooh’s original illustrations and Alice in Wonderland, and Through the Looking glass. 

A great picture book is the wordless, but very moving The Angel and the Soldier Boy. Besides Spot the dog, there are the great little picture books of Clifford the Big Red Dog, and Jillian Jiggs [a girl with a hilariously messy room and great illlustrations], the sweet little mouse Frederick the poet, the big, adorable, neat picture book The Golden Egg and the little picture book about Little Black Sambo, who outsmarts tigers and has pancakes with his mom and dad [he's from India in my version/copy of the book].

Also try the illustrated 'choose your adventure-style' picture book The Maze, which you can even ‘read’ online. It’s an actual maze, each page is a door. The pictures are really incredible, and it just draws you in. It's a great early book to get you ready to look at art in museums and notice details, so that you can enjoy the work even more. And most of all, it's crazy fun! 

Masquerade was another puzzle type picture book that sucked me in. It’s very difficult to solve. It has neat art.

This illustrated, large picture book of the Wizard of Oz with the best illustrations ever done by Charles Santore is a great one. Also look into the great fairy tales with medieval-like illustrations like Beauty and the Beast & Sleeping Beauty & St. George and the Dragon. 

Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are was amazing classic with great art, as was sad, more serious chapter book The Secret of the Andes, a book that still makes me nervous [it is similar in tone and style to the very terrifying and tragic story of The Island of the Blue Dolphin. 

For the A-Z alphabet learning, try Animalia by Gaeme Base, it has such gorgeous images that it should still be bought simply as a coffee table book. It's really amazing and detailed, like Bosch level thought was involved.

Mercer Mayer’s little critter books were so cute and sweet,  My Cousin Katie is on a farm for old fashioned memories, Arthur the aardvark for fun stories. Also look into the excellent, incomparable and top illustrated books [and later cartoon tv show] of The Busy World of Richard Scarry [with the fun, Austrian dressed character 'Lowly the talking/walking [on one foot!] worm' and his flying apple car] and the famous, lovely book about Maine, Blueberries for Sal.

I also loved The Water Babies gorgeous, real art picture book, where a young boy goes to a magical land of sea creatures; the illustrations are amazing. 

Halloween themed books were great too, like Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep. Little Witch’s Big Night by Deborah Hautzig was great–the illustrations were so adorable. The best book of all was a book of interesting scary stories called Now you see them now you don’t–it has fascinating, subtle stories that are more strange and ghostly than horror.

As a kid my only cookbook was a cookie one, the Alpha-Bakery Gold Medal Children’s Cookbook. Each letter has a recipe and it has very cute illustrations. I still love it.

For young people: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. What an introduction to the Renaissance, museums, the ancient world, sculpting, art and life, I loved it once I realized where it was going--and even then it always surprised me. Also look into Redwall for mystery and adventure lovers, Nancy Drew, and The Egypt Game [which for lovers of history, art, mystery and Egypt is more loved than the more famous The Westing Game].

Poetry

Here's a recommendation for anyone who love the environment and poetry: the volume The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature. It has some great work in it.

Another similar great book is Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology. 

Short Reads

If you're looking for some short reads online, try two blogs: the intellectual content aggregator blog Arts&LettersDaily -- if you want to read about France, try the great MimiThorisson, which has amazing photos and is a great read about life in the French rural world. Truly lovely photos and interesting reads.

If you want mostly photos, try MyFrenchKitchen, which has huge amounts of neat ones of the countryside. Or try HiP Paris. A great blog about elegant, gourmet Japanese/tiny European-style desserts is BossaCafez.

If you would like to have a gourmet's life in Paris, read DavidLebovitz. A cool French lifestyle blog [which is in both Fr. and Eng. I believe] is GaranceDoré.

Huge books

Some people enjoy reading enormous books, one such volume is Paul Anderson's book Hunger's Brides. It has two stories, the real story of the 1600s Mexican/Spanish genius intellectual and female saint Juana, usually called 'Sor Juana' [ie. sister as she became a nun] and the story of a modern troubled woman who is obsessed with the nun's life and her old lover who goes looking for her [and fears trouble has occurred]. The book is over 1,000 pages and is quite enormous.

The whole thing is very steeped in history and interesting detail, though it does turn macabre as it deals with the Spanish Inquisition and modern lawlessness and craziness, death, and violence. It's a great thing to try if you like Poe or House of Leaves. Also in this vein are the old spooky short stories of M.R. James and Hawthorne, Borges' short stories and further afield is the horrifying eerie work of Paul Bowles.

Pope

Many people avoid the greats, the classics. They are too hard, too strange, too out-of-date--and even a poetry and literature lover can understand that. Balzac and Hardy are people writing in their own time periods, about issues during that time and in styles of their period. They are reacting to their world, and sometimes what they are doing is more Dickensian 'pointing out injustice/evil' than what we are used to in our literature today.

Despite this, always (try) be willing to give them a second. A good example is the famous English long poet Alexander Pope [1688-1744]. I myself do not easily turn to him for fun, but then I read this excerpt from his poem "An Essay on Criticism" [read it all here]--so dip in and out of the classics once in a while, it might turn out you find something you love; doesn't this sound like Keats? :


A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
[...]

Joan Houlihan

We have to be sure to highlight Joan Houlihan for her excellent work. Her poetry volumes The Us and Ay are incredible. Here are more poems by her, and an interview, and a short/quick interview. While the first volume The Us is great, it has a nature-poem and simple/old fashioned country living appeal, a type of ancient, pre-historic vibe.

I myself enjoy it, but love the sequel Ay even more, here's an excerpt from the TaosJournal review, which has more excerpts if you like this one:

xSUMMER RIPE in the ground, deer fled
xxxxxxxxred-gold in the wood. Sticks put sharp
xxxxxxxxin the side bled the trail. 
[...]

And another excerpt from the Ay volume website:
[...]
As spark on spark fed sky-cold stars, smells bramble the fire. Powders of hazel-shell flare.
[...]

Richard Wilbur

If you love poetry, one great place to read critical discussions of it is at Critical Poetry Review Magazine. There's a nice, general essay about modern poetry here and a great one about different styles of modern poetry [and why people like or dislike them] by the excellent poet Joan Houlihan here.

Also, I want to make sure to highlight the great Ted Hughes-like [he was a poet laureate of England and Sylvia Plath's husband] work of Richard Wilbur, a poem called “Hamlen Brook” [scroll down to read it]. Here's an excerpt:


[...]
        And a white precipice
      Of mirrored birch-trees plunges down
Toward where the azures of the zenith drown.
      How shall I drink all this?

            Joy's trick is to supply
      Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
      Nothing can satisfy.

R. Nemo Hill

Just one more, we have to focus on R. Nemo Hill's incredible piece "The Girls Are In The Trees" in LavenderReview, issue 1: Sappho from 2010. The language is so close to ancient Greek lushness, similar to Shelley--it's just an amazing poem. Excellent work; it is something with an undertone of the baroque, something bejeweled that would get people sucked into poetry's lure. Very alluring, to wit.

Here's an excerpt:

Up from a crown of green break free these three
bright blossom-crusted branches, and from these
ascends a music pitched past anarchy: [...]

Mad bird song yields a carnage all its own,
a crop of bruised pink petals, shaken free
[...]

Jan Steckel

Despite having to rush off today, we have to make sure to feature Jan Steckel's great poem "Behind the Palisades" in LavenderReview, issue 1: Sappho, from 2010. The beginning and ending are superb, you rarely see this kind of great work. What an excellent control of language; all the layers here are amazing and intricate like Borges' work.

Here's an excerpt:

A Spanish hummingbird and I
staggered laughing over the cobblestones
clutching cut-glass cordial glasses of anisette
in Oxford May Day three in the morning.
Taste took me back twelve years
to a California canyon, filled with ferns.
How I chewed licorice in the green spray
of forbidden fennel for the first time,
[...]

For home was a
hollow of hurt burned worse than an iron,
and I ventured to England, to France and to Spain,
to stay away from that plain pain.

Frank X. Gaspar

Frank X. Gaspar has an excellent piece in Perihelion, issue 6 [vol. 2, ii from 2000] called "The Olive Trees". We rarely focus on 'straight narrative/explanation' poetry, but he has a great style and perfect subject matter--and a lock on beauty in words.

Many poets try to simply describe terrible scenes and dreary, rundown places, but there is nothing to look at there but the detritus of destruction, war, suffering and evil. While that type of poetry can help get people motivated to fix the world's problems, it is more a call to action than simple 'poetry' alone.

Here's an excerpt:

In the courtyard, in the center of the oldest building
among the old Spanish buildings, among the white 
stuccoed walls, among the ochre tiled roofs, the olive trees
are preparing to leave this world. They are dropping 
the dark boles [...]

[...]  how they leave the morning sun unperturbed?
[...]

Lynne Knight

We must feature Lynne Knight's great piece "Strange Crossings" in Perihelion, issue 6 [vol. 2, ii, from 2000]. It has a great aesthetic that makes you think of Pound's short Parisian-style poems. Knight has a great sense of imagery and style.

Here's an excerpt:

Black branches, rinsed with rain,
their blossoms a cross of dogwood 
and magnolia, so bright at dusk  
[...]



could reach you? I might as well 
have spilled the ink on water, 
watched it swirl and disappear. Besides, I was young in the dream,

too young to know how death would take your name like ink, 
make of it strange crossings, unearthly black-branched trees

[...]

Cynthia Atkins

This poem is one we had to highlight--it's Cynthia Atkin's piece "Proba Vitae" in TinderboxPoetryJournal, vol. 1 issue 2. It's got both a very Parisian and American cross-country roadway flavor--one or the other, or even both at the same time. It's reminiscent of Wyeth paintings [all of the painters] in a strong tonal way. What an amazing piece.

At the end, it veers sharply into American future/technology ideological hovering territory, which is more to the taste of perhaps people reading sci-fi or steampunk inspired work, but there's something older and classic in her work; something timeless.

Here's an excerpt:

Because it’s a snapshot
of spring, a bitten plum is open
on a table like a ripe mouth,
               next to a girl reading a book
from the library—stamped return.
[...]
Because flowers are here to serve up
the hard facts, petals are only
for show or blush? [...]

Lauren Camp

Sometimes when you read modern poetry, you see voices that would be great in full length, long poem formats--ie. an entire volume of one piece of work. One of these types of people is Lauren Camp, especially for her piece "Motion" in TinderboxPoetryJournal, vol.1 isssue 2.

This particular poem has an incredible voice that seems to emerge at the end, it's a type of Plath-like yet shuddering, eerie Poe inspired tone. Modern poetry can blend older distinct styles or famous thematic tones together to create amazing new work.

Here's an excerpt:

[...]
I watch from the window as night keeps loosening and coming down

with its charcoal heavy body, cloud-stretched and moon-stamped,
then drag-around dark with sunset off in a corner. Dead-ahead lightning

and long shadows of winter. The ground shoulders each hour of cold.

Mary Darby Robinson

One great gothic-esque poem for fall is Mary Darby Robinson's "The Trumpeter, an Old English Tale". It has some excellent stanzas, very reminiscent of The Song of Roland. Here's an excerpt:

[...]

And here sat a Baron, and there sat a Knight,
And here stood a Page in his habit all bright,
And here a young Soldier in armour bedight
With a Friar carous'd, one and all.

Some play'd on the dulcimer, some on the lute,
And some, who had nothing to talk of, were mute,
Till the Morning, awakened, put on her grey suit--
And the Lark hover'd over the Hall.


It was in a vast gothic Hall that they sate,
And the Tables were cover'd with rich gilded plate,
And the King and his minions were toping in state,
Till their noddles turn'd round, one and all:--
And the Sun through the tall painted windows 'gan peep,
And the Vassals were sleeping, or longing to sleep,
Though the Courtiers, still waking, their revels did keep,
While the minstrels play'd sweet, in the Hall.

[...]

Nettie McDaniel

We have to highlight Nettie McDaniel's great piece "One in the community" in StorySouth, from 2008. It's quite unique and has a lovely, radiant quality that has this strange depth, this bottom in which things are not dormant. It's incredible.

Here's an excerpt:

A flock of egrets twinkle like the distant stars
as they fly above the golden stubble in the rice field.

[...] On the day you lay

with your eyes sewn together under a spray
of woody French mulberry, masses of egrets

stood [...]

Allison Seay

We stopped what we were doing to feature Allison Seay's great piece "The Queen", which we saw at FishhousePoems. It's lovely and dark and gothic while still retaining a classical, almost Romantic or Shelley-like sense of reality and earth.

Here's an excerpt:

[...]

Wild gold and dark red.  The color of snow under a streetlamp.

Or of smoke pluming [...]

I want to ask her

which is worse: dying

or being dead.  And then I can see her floating away

as down a hill of ice. [...]

Plath

Fall is a great time to highlight Sylvia Plath's work. A famous poet in death, her work in the early 1900s is intense, emotive and raw. It's also still very popular, despite the lack of poetry in modern life.

One great poem for autumn is "The moon and the yew tree", a piece that is quietly eerie and strange. It's almost neo-gothic in a sense:

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky –
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness -
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and silence.