August's Attempt at Poetry: Sappho

Like all good Michigan honor students, I had a thorough grounding in Classics, very little of which I actually remember. But more importantly, I shared a department, albeit briefly, with Anne Carson, poet/novelist/translator/Classics prof. at the University of Michigan, which has drawn me to her translations over anyone else's, including all those I got to know in college. I was really delighted to find her new translation of Sappho's fragments, something I read as a freshman but never really took the time to enjoy.

There is an inherent flaw to reading them now -- they were intended as recitations, not written poems, first of all, and they exist in very small fragments, which means we're only able to read a tiny portion of Sappho's work. All the same, there is such an obvious elegance to what remains that despite something getting lost in translation, it still yields such riches. I think this is quite possibly the most rewarding volume of poetry I've read this year, and serves as a reminder of why I set out to read more in the first place

June's Attempt at Poetry: Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop was not a poet I was familiar with prior to this month, when I managed to read three distinct poetry collections. Although I went with a 'Complete Works of' poetry anthology, I read her work chronologically, as it was published, and because the individual volumes were relatively short, I was able to get through one published volume in a sitting, which was a good way to digest it. That said, it didn't thrill me in the way I expected -- I guess I thought that a twentieth-century woman poet would somehow be more meaningful to me than many of the others I've read, but that wasn't the case. I certainly enjoyed her writing but I expected her to quickly become my favorite, which wasn't the case. The one positive take-away though is that because I have a huge, complete volume of her work, I'll definitely keep reading her poetry, so maybe my response will evolve.

May's Attempt at Poetry: Walt Whitman

April's poetry attempt, Emily Dickinson, fell by the wayside as I was very distracted by warm weather and gardening in May and couldn't get myself into the right mood for her angsty poetry. So instead I went with Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass I had to read in school, but whose work I have never attempted as an adult. I'd still like to find the time to re-read Leaves of Grass, but this month I focused on Song of Myself and some later poems. I still don't feel like I have much of a grasp on him as an author because he was a novelist, essayist, and journalist, as well as a poet. Even if my exploration of his work is comparatively shallow, I did really enjoy what I read this month, possibly more than any other volume of poetry I've read so far this year...

April's (Failed) Attempt at Poetry: Emily Dickinson

So April's poetry selection did not go very well -- mostly in the sense that I never even cracked this thing open. As I've mentioned, the month of April was mostly a vacation from reading for me, and if I'm not motivated to read an Elena Ferrante novel, I'm certainly not motivated to read poetry, which is already a bit of a struggle. The saddest thing of all is that EdX had a course on Emily Dickinson that I signed up for and then failed to participate in, so this was actually a double failure. The questions now is whether I should shake it off and move on to some other poet who is perhaps more inspiring, or double-down and call Emily Dickinson my "April-May" poetry selection. 

March's Attempt at Poetry: 'Citizen' by Claudia Rankine and 'Prelude to Bruise' by Saeed Jones

This month I went in a completely different direction on the poetry front, and chose two recently published volumes of very critically-acclaimed and very contemporary poetry, Citizen: an American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, and Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones. Both are pretty quick read (100 pages each), and they pair really nicely together; although stylistically and structurally they are very different, they tread much of the same subject matter, namely race and identity (in the case of Prelude to Bruise, much of that identity is related to sexual and gender identity). 

You shouldn't need my endorsement, because these were two of the most decorated books published in 2014, but I personally would recommend them to anyone who, like me, doesn't read much contemporary poetry. Reading them will also just make you a cooler/better person.

February's Attempt at Poetry: Robert Frost

Robert Frost is one of those poets who looms very large in the American consciousness, but no one actually seems to know that much about him or have read any of his books. I decided to get a complete collected volume, and to read each book chronologically as a distinct part. I tried whenever possible to read each individual book in one sitting, but the longer I went on, the more tedious that became. I started very strong, enjoying the experience very much, but it started to run together the further I went, and I think now the best approach is to focus on individual volumes, and spread the Robert Frost poetry out throughout your lifetime. Granted, that is not the goal of my reading poetry in 2015, but it's what I would suggest to anyone interested in Robert Frost. 

It might seem counter-intuitive to read poems generally focused on farming and the natural world in February, but it's all been very top-of-mind, as February is really the time of year when I get most cabin fever-y and start the daydreaming/planning for my garden. Robert Frost is a nice accompaniment for seed catalogs, which I've been poring over, along with the writing of Annie Dillard, which I've been re-reading for a Bookhive List post later this week. Somehow it's all helped to keep me sane and focused on the warmer days ahead.

January's Attempt at Poetry: Rainer Maria Rilke

The introduction to my edition of Rilke's poetry states that entire books have been written solely about Rilke's Duino Elegies; if that's not a deterrent to reading poetry, I don't know what is, and that's coming from someone who is reading War and Peace for really unironic fun. But in keeping with my Reading Resolutions to both read more poetry and read more academic texts that I missed out on as an undergrad, I read the Duino Elegies all the same, knowing full-well that I was certainly missing something, but enjoying the experience all the same.

For one thing, you can read all ten elegies in a sitting, making this a relatively painless undertaking. I didn't study German in school, but I took a crash course on reading in college to help with my senior thesis research, and I still enjoy reading German whenever I get the chance (which is not often), especially something like this with a more archaic vocabulary. This is not any kind of humble brag because my German is terrible, but my point is that having the German and English texts side by side was actually quite engaging, and if you have even the most basic understanding of German, I recommend this style of translation.

Following Duino Elegies, I read Sonnets to Orpheus, which reminded me precisely why I've struggled with poetry in the past; after each sonnet I felt a surge of panic and guilt -- panic that I wasn't "feeling" profoundly enough, and guilt that maybe I could have read the poem "better." The point of this exercise, though, is to get over that feeling, or at least gain the ability to push through it and find my own way of enjoying the poetry. Confidence as a poetry-reader is probably too lofty a goal to shoot for, but maybe someday I'll get there.

An interesting tidbit from Wikipedia: Rilke is apparently extremely popular because he's been adopted by many in the New Age world. I can't even really express how little I understand this.