A Late Entry

Saturdays at Poets House are nice. There's that end of the week mentality coupled with the simple fact that since it's the end of the week, there isn't much left to do anyway. Running out of books to process, we all took our time today. It was Carlin, Stellan, Renni, and Izzy and me. I just met Izzy. She's been working there for a while, but she works on Saturdays, so I missed her my first Saturday, and she was sick last Saturday.

Stellan was not there when I came in, so I got straight to work on processing books as he'd taught me how yesterday. Mike and Katherine have been wanting me to bring in my own music, so I brought some today. We had a music fest. Everybody played a little bit. I'm going to make sure my Feel Good Lost - Broken Social Scene album gets regular play. It's great for working to.

I spent a lot of time today doing what I had been told was the main bonus of the internship, reading while I work. We get tons of really interesting books in each week from the last year (and some brand spankin' new '08 releases), and it's hard to just process and pass on to the next. Besides, we're running low on work anyway. Mike said if we ever want to borrow a book, since after all the place is a library, just make a note of it or let him know. I brought home two books.

your whole life - Douglas Goetsch
Much to my surprise, the picture on the back of the author was taken by Laure-Anne! I wonder if she could ever guess that her name on a photo credit would sell me on a writer. I didn't know you were a camera whiz. Well if they know each other, that's enough for me to bring the book home. It's a short book, a publication awarded him by Slipstream. It's an anual thing. However, it seems this guy has been writing for a while. He's got a handful of books out, a couple catching the eye of Billy Collins. Their writing style is similar. Goetsch's poems focus mostly on childhood perception; even in poems where adults are featured there is a hint that how society acts is no less childish (for better or worse) than it is on the playground of one of his poems:

Recess

A ring of children seated Indian style,
  a girl deciding which head to tap
    as she orbits them in her pretty dress

saying duck duck duck duck duck.
  Every boy wants to be the goose,
    to bolt up and run down this girl

before she makes it around
  to the spot he vacated. Once
    they saw her and fall, exposing

a lovely backside covered in lace.
  Maybe that is why their heads rise
    like charmed snakes as she passes

saying duck duck duck duck duck,
  annoying the girls in the circle, who frown,
    and attracting now the attention

of their teacher, leaving against a tree,
  bringing her gaze down from the clouds
    where she had been pondering two men—

the one she recently broke up with
  filling her with regret about the much
    better, more beautiful one from college.

Now she is twenty-nine, on perhaps
  the last warm day of September,
    the smartest, prettiest girl in the class

is going duck duck duck duck duck
  in an endless left hand turn,
    and she can’t figure out whether

the girl is powerful or helpless,
  as she blinks back tears and blows
    the whistle to end this.

The second book I grabbed, which I haven't had the chance to scan through is The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry. I'm excited to read some of the essays printed here. They always have such a good selection. I hope to find something that will help me with my conference work for my Stevens class. A quick leaf through has me in hopes of being able to use at the very least a "reception" from the back of the book called "Modernist poetry and the cannon." For those that don't know, I'm looking (in a broad sense currently) at the history of poetry between the books of Stevens and today. I want to look objectively at what's been happening in poetry on the grand scale to see if I can identify what exactly the Modernist movement of Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and Stevens did to shape the poetry of today. Any suggestions, let me know.

I'll be posting sometimes during the week, since now I have a bit more to say about various things. Stay tuned.