The Two Books I'm Enjoying Most Right Now

Okay re-enjoying.

These books have held up over many years, sustained hundreds of readings.

And they're still here.

Susan Stewart's Columbarium is filled with glorious atavisms. Talk about the ole reculer. This poet writes after Virgil, after Goethe, after the Elizabethan, and with such mastery that to call it merely enviable would be serious-as-fuck understatement.

She wouldn't use understatement in that last sentence. She would use the word meiosis, and write a fascinating poem with that theme and would bathe the reader in the deep waters of etymology.

Mad prosodic skills in this poet.

Not every poem is perfect, and not every poem is even likeable but the proportion of successes to failures or ho-hum poems is that one encounters in less than one percent of poetry books.

I always say a poetry book is a success if it has at least ten pages of memorable poetry in it.

I realize that's a little "Sodom and Gomorrah" God-reasoning, but Hey the reader's God, right?

If you only live in the poetic present and aren't really a "deep reader" (about 90% of poets are, I estimate...okay maybe closer to 95%) you'll hate this book.

Well, maybe you won't.

If you love Ovid and Virgil, you'll probably love this.

The other book is Alice Notley's Close to me & Closer...(The Language of Heaven) coupled with Desamere in the double volume put out by Scalapino's O Books.

Both of these books still believe (atavistically, I suppose) in the idea of the visionary, of vaticination.

And that's fine because both books are visionary.

And both poets can pull it off.

I suppose Stewart's uses for the otherworldly are more a strange form of rhetoric laid over the concinnity of her lyric.

She's like one of those postmodern painters who break your heart when they quote Renaissance views of Heaven.

Because the belief is shattered, but the form of belief is still there.

She argues with the Divine about its non-existence.

And the beauty of the forms she discovers in her wandering doubt begins to make one believe.

The funny thing that happens with the darkest saints happens with her book.

They go cursing and disbelieving in the Divine right up to the point they bump into It.

What would the hagiography be without those funny saints?

Stewart's is an honest, cruel art.

Alice Notley, on the other hand, seems thorougly tapped into the other world, seems mostly to live there, that other world which--of course--still exists.

Everything is the "other" world. Everything that's not you. So it exists.

Notley is one of the few poets deserving the epithet "epic" today; although she might not want it now that every kid on the street corner uses it for the hottie passing. "Epic hotties" are everywhere.

But Alice Notley is an epic hottie.

The wild lysergic imagery of this collection arises from the fascinating woids and voids she deploys.

And there's an interesting grammatical morph that continues through the collection.

In a sense, this work is even more Ovidian. This is a modern Metamorphoses.

(You should really own this book in its entirety. You can't excerpt from it or be satisfied with whatever got in the Selected.)

Notley eschews elegies in favor of colloquies with the Dead. Her Dead.

And it's always a beautiful thing.

She makes you believe because you know it's true. People don't stop when they die.

Desnos appears in this text because Notley shares much methodology with this poet who worked mostly below waking consciousness.

Notley knows the only way to diagnose culture is to go into its subconscious.

She did that by entering the Subway of our cultural collective unconsciousness (remember when Hart Crane did this) in her masterpiece The Descent of Alette.

Who else could read the demonic presence of Bill Gates in a poem but Alice Notley lol?

Think of this book as a companion piece.