GREAT LINES:

Life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change beds. This one would like to suffer facing the stove, that one believes that he would be cured next to the window.
– Stephen Mallarme

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The youngest poet in the anthology was born in 1900 and none is still living. “Modern” does not mean contemporary or even recent, really. They were modern for their time, right? And, as Moderns, they were all about the new, breaking with tradition, ensuring art resonates with the times. Shocking stuff like that. Editor Louis Simpson’s Moderns include Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Stephane Mallarme, Pierre Reverdy, Tristan Tzara, and Andre Breton. As I am not fluent in a language other than English, I cannot vouch for the word-for-word accuracy of these translations, I can only say whether the results are poems in this language. Louis Simpson, a poet himself, has crafted poems that bring new styles into English and poems that show to advantage his own sense of the language. With lines like “Night is at hand, the criminal’s ally, / Entering with a wolfish step. The sky / Closes slowly like the door in a wall,” one can be intrigued by Charles Baudelaire. Paul Verlaine says, identifying with night’s abashment before a beautiful woman, “Evening fell, equivocal, dissembling.” And the poetic prodigy Arthur Rimbaud, speaking as for a boat, enjoys the ravages of the sea, “I stood my night watches blessed by tempests … Without needing a lighthouse’s silly lights!” If you want to know why Patti Smith and Jim Morrison worshiped Rimbaud or wish to mark dreamtime with the original Surrealists, you’ll get a good start here. The French originals appear opposite Simpson’s English versions.

Check the BPL catalog for this title: Modern Poets of France

GREAT LINES:

Open the shoe-store door

and a bell rings:

two shoehorns on a shoelace

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Purely as an image it’s a homely one, a handcrafted welcome/alert that the door activates as a customer enters, or exits; the customer hears the bell and looks up, the tongue-shaped shoehorns ringing against each other, the stout shoelace knotting them loosely in place. We are accustomed to hearing a door chime in a retail store, but rarely notice the bell. Among fourteen words chosen for the poem “shoe” appears three times, each time part of a compound: shoe-store, shoehorn, shoelace. Although the word doesn’t hit the ear with a bell-like sound, it recurs in a bell-like fashion, the ringing of repetition. The sh-sh-sh hints at a shoe-like shuffle, perhaps, not out of place in a shoe-store. Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser wrote the poems of Braided Creek in a collaboration not quite spelled out. Let’s reject the “continuing cult of personality,” they say, telling readers it doesn’t matter which of us wrote what. If you know their work already (both Harrison and Kooser have many books of their own) you may be able to tease out one style from the other. Harrison writes novels and to me some of the pieces suggest prosier habits, for example. But, never mind. Braided Creek is a pleasing meditation on a quieter life, often nature-surrounded, wisdom in crafted, palm-sized bits, some fleeting thoughts, many amusing observations, a series of small events, haiku-like in their simplicity and precision. “The butterfly / jots a note on the wind / to remind itself of something.”

Check the BPL catalog for this title: Braided Creek

GREAT LINES:

Trout seem to learn that danger

Is associated with artificial flies;

Perhaps it is the hook in them.

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Though the subtitle is “found poems,” perhaps it’s more appropriate to call these “edit poems.” Annie Dillard read a variety of texts and found in them statements and phrasings that fascinated or amused her. The result, once assembled, is like collage or mosaic, a new picture is made out of broken off pieces. Dillard mines a junior high primer, an oceanography text, the New Testament Apocrypha, among other sources. My favorite poem, “The Hunter,” is one Dillard snipped from a book by a Russian naturalist. “Do you know how a hunter’s heart unfolds? / I walked over the snow – the crust held. … One lacks words to describe what the deep forest / Is like at night when you know that the great birds / Are asleep overhead.” I am enchanted by the seeking suggested, not just a hunt for prey, but a search for one’s place in the world. A sensibility is at play in this collection, nosing through a world of half-discarded knowledge and finding toys, some of which, it turns out, are surprisingly serious. Asks Vincent van Gogh in lines Dillard extracted from one of his letters, “Why should not the shining dots of the sky / Be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?”

Check the BPL catalog for this title: Mornings Like This: Found Poems