Nisha, Feb. 25, 2014

A friend and coworker of mine passed away yesterday. I wrote this as a way to let out some of my thoughts and emotions, but also as a way to honor her. We worked together at the University Journal student newspaper, and she was one of our news editors. This poem, along with other thoughts by people on staff, is going to appear in the newspaper tomorrow. Yes, we still put out a paper. After all, the world of news doesn't pause, even for those times when a person's world stops turning. So here's to you, Nisha.


Nisha, Feb. 25, 2014

She had a way of making me forget

she was a smoker. Electronic cigarette,

a pen-like object she used in the office

to become a dragon lazily breathing out fumes.

Naturally curly hair pulled away from her face,

feet propped up on the counter,

she showed me the reason why smoking

was once seen as sophisticated and classy.

She used to laugh about how she

was the only person here who spoke Farsi,

a language she learned in the military

but had no civilian use for, except

to write in that Persian alphabet

from time to time, letters that were

nothing more than pictures to me,

intricate doodles on a sheet of paper.

I heard the news last night —

Nisha Hood died today.

I can’t seem to remember when I last saw her,

or what we talked about.

Work, school, plans, no idea.

So I choose her final impression:

An exquisite, confident woman

in a cream peacoat and black boots,

laughing and smiling with her eyes.

What's Elizabeth Reading? ...Best American Poetry 2013

I'm not really sure how to talk about an entire book of poetry, and I'll admit that up front.

I've recently discovered, thanks to an exercise I did in a class, that I prefer poetry that either portrays an experience or a snapshot of memory/life or explores an idea. With that said, there were some poems in The Best American Poetry 2013 that I enjoyed and some I did not. My least favorite was "Joe Adamczyk" by Mitch Sisskind, and I think my favorite was "Wintering" by Kevin Young, though "George W. Bush" by Mark Jarman had the ideas I found to be most intriguing. There are 75 poems in this collection, each by a different poet and each following its own style. Most are contemporary in tone and language--for instance, the first poem compares sex to a sandwich with mayonnaise and the second poem is a numbered list of 101 one- to two-line statements, usually incomplete, that tell a story (example: "54. The dirt was gone. 55. Except for a few grains that had embedded themselves into his palm.").

The poems are mostly in either free-verse or in some form the poet made up to suit their own purposes (Exhibit A: That second poem. It's titled "Pachyderm," by the way, and is by Sherman Alexie). I don't know what that says about American poetry these days compared with poetry from other places throughout history, but there you go.

This is not a book for those who . . . how to put this. It isn't porn, but it hints at porn from time to time. One poem is about an exotic dancer, for example. But what do you expect from a book of poetry that starts out with a poem that compares sex to a sandwich? No, it isn't being sexist with that comparison, though there are poems in there about being sexist.

This collection is the 2013 installment of The Best American Poetry, and I think that series title deserves a pause. Did this collection represent America? Was it supposed to? I don't know, to be honest. I didn't travel throughout America in 2013. I feel like the collection was a mix of ideas and morals, scenes and voices, and that is what makes up America. Mixing pot, you know. In the introduction, Denise Duhamel, the guest editor for this collection, mentions that she had problems trying to portray "American": "I understood the basic concept - I was to choose work written by poets living in or from America, most likely from magazines published in the United States, though I was able to consider American poets published abroad. How was I able to get in as much of America as possible?" Add to the usual problems of diverse cultures and walks of life the problem that not every sector of America has great poets, and also, that she was not able to consider all types of poetry. I'm not sure about other types, but I know there were no sound bites in this book allowing me to listen to a spoken-word poem, something that isn't meant to be read at all, but heard. Songs are also a form of poetry, and they were not represented. So the series is inherently flawed, but maybe I see it that way because of my more-liberal definition of "poetry."

I did something new and made a pinboard for this book on Pinterest. Only rarely am I a Pinterest user, but I thought it would be an interesting experiment to pin one image per poem. I'm not sure it helped with my comprehension of the poems, but it did force me to pay attention to the imagery and the central ideas or themes used. I was sometimes (okay, more than sometimes) saucy in my captions, so be warned. Click here to visit the board. Note: There is no nudity or crude imagery on the board, though the comments may make mention of sex (never graphically).

P.S. - I just submitted my first-ever piece of feedback to Google. My request? I told them I want to be able to type em dashes into blog posts. There is no way to do that now without copying one from another website. I consider this request both extremely practical and nerdy.

Finished a 4x6" Notebook

I keep notes all over the place. On my phone, on my computer, in a 4x6 spiral notebook, on random scraps of paper. I carry the 4x6 notebook with me, and it's where I put things that do not have a home in a current project. They're just observations, wordings, things I've heard people say, stuff. The idea is that by writing them down, I'll actually remember them and be able to use them later. Since I just finished filling one notebook up and am moving onto a new one (the old one looks quite beat up in comparison, by the way), I thought I'd share some of the things I've written down in the one I just finished.

Write so well, the reader forgets they are reading! This is the first thing I have written down. It's in big letters and takes up the entire page. Obviously, it isn't something I'm going to use in my writing, but it is something I try to keep in mind. A goal, you might say. I have a few things like this--ideas and reminders about writing itself--that I have written down.

Waterfall made up of puddles going down stairs.

Cookies 'n' Cream snow - To see how I put this to use, read my poem "Spears of Grass."

"I felt like I'd finally entered the twent ... the twent ... what century is this?" -Dr. Spencer (one of my fiction professors)

The need to be treated as an adult by one's parents

My shadow has swag

Clouds forming mountains in the sky, raising the horizon

Just this side of Styx

Fog shampoo

"Skyler." (Pause) "Skyler." (Pause) "Like, Mitch's friend."

Everything is normal, and the weirdos in your dreams will go away if you melt them in your hands.

"I packed myself a sandwich today, and as soon as I had eaten it, I wished I had packed two sandwiches."

What's Elizabeth Reading? ...Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible ... I'm not sure exactly where to start. It was published in 1998, and centers around a family from Georgia, U.S.A. who move to the Congo in 1959 with the goal of converting the Congoese people to Christianity. The star characters include Nathan Price, the patriarch of the family and a Baptist minister with a condescending attitude; Orleanna, matriarch of the family who is not so religious as her husband and feels overwhelmed; Rachel, the oldest daughter and a materialistic-minded teenager; Leah, one of the twins and the child who most wants to gain her father's approval and love; Adah, the other twin and a crippled, yet incredibly intelligent, girl who refuses to talk; and Ruth May, the youngest and, as such, the most innocent and openly curious. The book chronicles their life in the Congo and after, including a good amount of history.

The thing that sets this book apart, in my opinion, is the narrative strategy Kingsolver used. I'm doing this part of the blog post with the help of a peer-reviewed essay by Anne Marie Austenfield, by the way, called, "The Revelatory Narrative Circle in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible." The book is told from the points of view of each female in the family. The sections are started by Orleanna, who focuses on the motivations and reasons behind both the events of the larger history going on and their own story. After Orleanna's introduction, the girls take over, each taking up the story wherever the last one left off. This leaves the reader with multiple perspectives on a single story. It's a great idea--though it must have been an immense project to write--because it takes the bias of narrators into account. No one character can tell an entire story, so Kingsolver is doing what must be the next best thing (minus third-person omniscient, which is not in vogue right now). So you can get an idea of how this works, here is a list of what the girls each focus on in their chapters:

Rachel - relationships, material details, conversations, emotions, recognizable behaviors (anything that appears "normal")
Leah - historical/cultural details, relationships and emotional connections, integration of prior knowledge
Adah - wonders of nature, absurdity of the human-made world, language, biology, politics, qualities of truth vs. falsity when it comes to human thought and behavior

Picture I found of the Price family -
From top left: Nathan, Orleanna, Rachel,
From bottom left: Leah, Adah, Ruth May

Ruth May - observations based from five senses and her dreams/desires

The interesting side effect of this style of narration is that this novel has no main character. Each of the narrators are, by turns, both the main character and secondary characters.

When I finished this book, I reread Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, partially because I own it and so it was a simple thing to do and partially because both books are concerned with the white presence in Africa, so I wanted to compare. Biggest difference? Conrad only has one black character who talks; that black person is basically a white person's lapdog, and he only gets one line: "Mistah Kurtz--he dead." This line coming from a white black man makes sense, since it's both Africa saying farewell and the Europeans. Also, Kurtz himself was a black white man. In Poisonwood, black people are talking all the time, starting from page 25 (when they get to the Congoese village) and running through the end of the book. Kingsolver's Africans are real people; Conrad's Africans are a personification of Africa. Looking at them side by side, I feel like Darkness is not about Africa at all. There simply isn't enough Africa in it for it to be about Africa. It is about colonialism, and the story could have taken place anywhere. Poisonwood is undoubtedly about Africa, its people, and the effect of Africa on others. If it were placed anywhere else, the story would necessarily change.

All that said, this book fell short about halfway through. Doing a little more research revealed why: Kingsolver did not write this book to tell a story; she wrote this book to make a point, and that was her entire purpose. It feels like, and is, a message with a story, instead of a story with a message. Like having so much marinara sauce it's tomato soup instead of a nice plate of spaghetti, the message makes this fall flat as a fiction book. According to Austenfield, Kingsolver wrote this as a fictional story because she wasn't able to actually travel to the Congo at the time (she's spent time living there previously, however), so she could not just record the memoirs of those who live there and produce a nonfiction text. Fiction was the next best thing.

I'm a little too fiction-minded to be happy at that discovery.

I like this book enough that I find myself trying to think of someone I can loan the book to, though I haven't thought of anyone yet. If you're reading this book, and just want a story and not a history lesson, I would suggest reading it up until page 414 and then call it quits. The story is pretty much over at that point, and after page 375, it feels like a giant, 168-page epilogue. It isn't downright bad, it just isn't nearly as good after page 375. I'm saying read until 414 because I think that gives more closure, a sort of resolution.