On Reading: Blue Nights by Joan Didion

I read Blue Nights by Joan Didion over the last two days. A deceptively slim book, it is rich and heavy. Last summer I read her The Year of Magical Thinking when I was devouring grief narratives. I had bought Blue Nights at the same time, but The Year of Magical Thinking was so devastating, I didn't think I could handle this one as well so soon.

The Year of Magical Thinking is considered a memoir about the death of Didion's husband, while Blue Nights is considered a memoir about the death of her daughter, but I don't think this is true. Yes, Quintana's death is an important part of the narrative, but Blue Nights is a meditation on mortality and Quintana's is used as a lens through which Didion views her own.

Didion's realization that her own death is coming, that her body is failing her, that she is becoming frail is beautifully revealed. A slow dawning, and perhaps an acceptance, to a degree, in light of her daughter's death.

There is much circling in the prose, returning to phrases and images, that makes Blue Nights feel almost like a long poem. I felt very much like I was privy to Didion's thought process, they way her mind now works, something that she's figuring out now.

The Year of Magical Thinking was so clearly about death and grief, while Blue Nights is more elusive. It's about mortality and mourning, which Didion clearly shows, is not the same ad death and grief--it's a fine line between them, but it is a line.

It's also about parenthood, while YOMT was about a marriage. The former messy and rich with loss, the later idealized. Perhaps it's not fair to compare the two books this way as they are much more different than they appear on the surface, but it also seems impossible not to. Blue Nights is an incredibly intimate book, but I didn't find it devastating. I had expected to, and am thankful that I didn't, but I'm also not sure why. Is it because Didion's revelations are my own? Or they are so removed from my own? I'm not sure, but I know I'll return to Blue Nights, probably sooner rather than later.

On Reading: Stag's Leap, part six (and final)

I finished reading Stag's Leap Wednesday evening and I really enjoyed the final section "Years Later," especially the final few poems.

I found the whole section strong, possibly the strongest section in the book, except for one poem. While I appreciated the visual play attempted in "Read Sea," I found it lacking. I suppose there is a reason Olds doesn't often play with form. I don't think she's confident in it. I think she could be--she's clearly an excellent poet--but like anything, it's a skill that needs to honed and perhaps she's not interested in it enough to spend the time working on it.

On thing I admired in "Years Later" was how imagery found in poems throughout the collection are revisited, reach what could be considered either their pinnacle or, perhaps, denouement--celestial, marine, sexual, geological, mortality.

The morality feels more pronounced in this section, but it has a different tone. Earlier, such as when Olds had written about her miscarriage, death and loss were about lives cut too short, about lost potential, about tragedy. But in this final section the tone has shifted. In general, it feels more generous, more open, more kind, and specifically in terms of morality, there is an acceptance--no railing against what could have, should have been--but an acknowledgement of death's inevitability in mentioning her mother's and father's deaths, the hoped for long life.

Years later, during his cremation,
the liquids left my father's corpse,
and smoke left the flue. And even
later, my mother's ashes left
my hand, and fell as seethe into the salt
chop. … (from "What Left?")

Clearly, this change in tone at the end of the book signals an acceptance to the narrator's divorce. In the poem "Years Later", the narrator and her ex-husband have met in a park (Central Park this reader assumes). There is acceptance, a longing that is less mournful than stoic, and it's not a longing of desire (what she wants) but a longing of what has passed--a gentle nostalgia. The poem ends:

...And then there is the spring park,
damp as if freshly peeled, sweet
greenhouse, green cemetery with no
dead in it--except in some shaded
woods, under some years of leaves and
rotted cones, the body of a warbler
like a whole note fallen from the sky--my old
love for him, like a songbird's rib cage picked clean.

Her love for him, no longer rotting or decomposing--stinky and messy--but clean and fragile. A skeleton of what it once was. I find the final two lines of this poem stunning.

"Years Later" leads in "September 2001, New York City" a poem, we know from the title, will hold death, but not the death(s) we expect. She opens the poem with:

A week later, I said to a friend: I don't
think I could ever write about it.
Maybe in a year I could write something.

Clearly, years have passed and she has written something, but other than the dream image of a a game of jacks, the events of 9/11 aren't explored directly. What I do find interesting, is the warbler image returns, this time as her mother:

… And I thought of my
mother, minutes from her death, eighty-five
years from her birth, the almost warbler
bones of her shoulder under my hand, the
eggshell skull, as she lay in some peace

I now want to reread the collection to see if the warbler image is used earlier. Not off the top of my head, but knowing how Olds returns to images, I think it must be there. The warbler image here relates to someone fragile, someone loved. Olds requests that we make a connection between her "almost warbler bones" of her mother and the warbler skeleton of her love for her husband--something precious, something fragile.

Before I return Stag's Leap to the shelf, I want to address the last poem briefly. "What Left" is where we leave the narrator on her journey, and it's a meditation on where she was and where she is now. There is a rhythm to the piece that builds, almost an incantation. She explores conception, birth, nursing, the death of her parents (as noted above), and ultimately what she and her ex-husband accomplished together and for each other in their marriage. The final third of the poem is one long sentence:

We fulfilled something in each other--
I believed in him, he believed in me, then we
grew, and grew, I grieved him, he grieved me,
I completed with him, he completed with me, we
made whole cloth together, we succeeded,
we perfected what lay between him and me,
I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me,
I did not leave him, he did note leave me,
I freed him, he freed me.

That final line. Normally, that would make me cringe. It's sappy and sentimental, absolutely, but Olds earns it. If this line showed up anywhere else in the collection or even in the poem itself I would object, but ending the collection this way is especially rewarding for the readers who read from front to back.

I'm going to put aside Stag's Leap now, but I know I will return to it. If you've read it, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the collection. Do you disagree with anything I've written? Have a completely different take? Please let me know! I'd love to have a discussion about it.

If you'd like to read all six sections, you can find them here

the pleasure of reading her again

I am turning forty this year. It's a big number, weighed down with baggage and expectations. I wish I could say that I'm staring down this number with grace and a light heart. Turning thirty was not a problem for me (I say, in retrospect--am I rewriting history here? I don't think so, but I might). I still have plenty of time in my thirties--the perk of being an autumn baby.

But I didn't want to write about aging today, so let me steer this post around.

It is fashionable amongst a certain set of people on social media to read only certain types of books in a year. A few years ago it was The Year of The Short Story (#YOSS). This year, I'm seeing a lot of The Year of the Woman (#ReadWomen2014) or The Year of People of Colour. I'm not one to jump on wagons of any sort, but I'm going to hitch my own this year--not exclusively, of course; I am a polyamorous reader.

But, staring down forty, I'd like to reread some books that were important to me earlier in my life. Steinbeck's East of Eden is the only novel I can think of that I've read as a teen and in my twenties. I'm going to reread it this year and will plan to read it in my forties as well.

I'm also going to reread Keith Maillard's Gloria. Gloria is a beloved book. I read it in my mid-twenties and it has stayed with my in a way very few novels have. I've said that it taught me how to be a woman, though I'm not quite sure that's true anymore. It at least shaped how I was a woman in my mid-twenties. I've been nervous to revisit it because I have elevated it so high in my mind and heart. But I am reading it again. I'm only about sixty pages in, but oh, it's so good to be back with Gloria. I'd forgotten a lot, but not everything, of course. Being with her is like being with an old friend. It all comes flooding back, and the past and present are richer because of it.

I'm a slow reader, so I'm not sure if there will be more books I will reread this year (both Gloria and East of Eden are long. There aren't that many that I can remember reading in my twenties that have really stuck with me, though as I write this, I few are popping in my head. But no grand pronouncements, no hashtags needed. Just the pleasure of revisiting a good friend.

On Reading: Stag's Leap, part five

The "Summer" section of Stag's Leap only has four poems and they left me frustrated. Perhaps it's because I taught a form class last semester and I've become enamoured with form, constraints, and poetic devises, that these free verse (and not, may I point out, free verse in the sense of organic verse) confessional poems are starting to feel like a drag. More than halfway through, there has been little deviation--almost no stanzas, few indentations. They look and sound the same.

I reread the four poems of "Summer" only once. I assume if I gave this section closer read, I'd be rewarded, but I simply didn't want to. The subjects of these four poems were none that I wanted to sink into deeper. The one that held my attention the most, "Skleekit Cowrin'" turned me off with its heavy-handed symbolism--mice traps on the wedding china, leaving the mouse corpse on the plate on the porch and it being infested by bugs. I'm sure that there is more artistry in the poem and the others in "Summer" but I don't have the patience or inclination to find them right now.

The following section, "Fall," only has four poems as well, but this section appealed to me more. I read "Haircut" as I was in the salon waiting for one of my own, which was a nice little gift. It probably does not need to be noted that my haircut was nothing like the one in the poem.

That said, I find "Crazy" the most compelling in the section. Ultimately, it's a revisitation and reconsideration of what it means to be "crazy for each other"--a phrase the speaker claims to have used (often) in the past. It begins:

I've said that he and I had been crazy
for each other, but maybe my ex and I were not
crazy for each other. Maybe we
were sane for each other, as if our desire
was almost not even personal--

Olds' choice to have "crazy" end the first and begin the third line not only draws attention to the word in its repetition and prominent places on the lines, but also transforms them into their own parenthesis, having the second line--a line which simply announces she and her ex--be surrounded by "crazy." It's a subtle nod to what the poem will explore. Perhaps the crazy was not them, but outside of them.

The speaker ruminates on what the alternatives were, if they weren't crazy for each other--a marriage arranged by the elements (with "a fire of pleasure like a violence/of kindness); they were "sane for each other"; that their union was inevitable "like the earth's and moon's paths" (that line got an eye roll from me, I admit--so hard to invoke the heavens that way). The speaker then admits that despite these other options, she was crazy about him

--oh for God's sake
I was besotted with him. Meanwhile the planets
orbited each other; the morning and the evening
came.…

Her invocation of celestial bodies returns, this time paired with "each other," a term used throughout in reference to her and her ex--three times in the first four lines of the poem alone. Here, the reader can't but help fuse the speaker and her ex with objects in the sky.

Now that the speaker is confident with admitting that she was crazy for him, she considers what he felt for her and settles on "mortal fondness," a phrase that feels both full and paternalistic, or perhaps avuncular.

With this realization, that yes, he had positive feelings for her, but nothing near what she felt for him, Olds ends the poem, returning to the celestial imagery and "each other":

What precision of action
it has taken, for the bodies to hurtle through
the sky for so long without harming each other.

Is there relief or gratitude in this? The tone implies this, but there is also a hint of accusation in "what precision of action/ it has taken" suggests deliberate action on the ex's part, avoiding the implosion for as long as they had.

On Reading: Stag's Leap, part four

The most compelling poem in the short section "Spring" is "To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now." Largely, I find this compelling because I am drawn to poems about loss, especially the loss of a child. Part morbid fascination, part research, and part because I've been writing about this subject myself.

What I most appreciate about this poem is the tone--not sentimental, yet full of feeling; visceral without being macabre.

The poem is layered with loss. Obviously, the poet is ruminating on her miscarried son, and, being in a collection about her divorce, she weighs these losses against each other ("That he left me is not much, compared/to your leaving the earth…") but she also considers her own mortality.

The exploration of her own mortality was the most interesting to me, as she is reflecting on her lost son in what appears to be a new way to her:

…And yet
the idea of you has come back to where
I could see you today as a small,impromptu
god of the partial.

She imagines upon her own death, he will be there waiting for her her and asks,

When I leave for good,
would you hold me in your blue mitt
for the departure hence.

She desires to be cradled by this son she never knew, a son (who may not have been a son at all) who she never cradled, but who

…moved house, from uterus
to toilet bowl and jointed stem
and swear out to float the rivers and
bays in painless pieces.

She ends the poem:

I never thought
to see you again, I never thought to seek you.

What I find interesting in this, is she does not write "I never thought I would see you…" but "I never thought to see you" which sounds a little more awkward only because we are used to reading/hearing the former. In the way she has written it, she is clearly enforcing that she is conjuring her son. She will never see him again, but in creating this fantasy of him bringing her to the afterlife, in remembering his loss thirty years earlier, she finds a comfort. She had "never thought to seek" him, but does so now, in the wake of divorce. This seeing, this seeking is not a mourning of potential--of what or who the son would have, could have been--but a sense of perspective and, more importantly, a celebration of the essence of what he is now--a creation of her, of her imagination, of her creativity.

On Reading: Stag's Leap, part three

The penultimate poem of the "Winter" section is "The Easel." Other than "Not Going to Him" and "Pain I Did Not" I wasn't really taken with the poems in this section on first read. I decided to revisit the section before moving on to see what I may have missed. When I did, "The Easel" stood out.

On the surface, the poem deals with tropes I'm not excited by: the destruction of an ex's property, choosing art over family/love. I sped through reading this one the first time, but I'm glad that I returned to it.

Yes, the speaker is dismantling and then burning her ex-husband's easel. But of course, the easel is more than an easel. Once she has set it alight, "by the flame-light" she realizes that this easel is more than just something he once owned, but something that was integral to their early life together:

...all told, maybe
weeks, a month of stillness--modeling
for him, our first years together,

That honeymoon year, a month in hours of when she was his object.

Olds is famous for mining her family's life for her art. Her poetry is unabashedly autobiographical, confessional. When she writes:

… I am burning his left-behind craft,
he who was the first to turn
our family, naked, into art.

I cannot help but read this as an accusation, or perhaps a defence of her own choices. Ending the line on "to turn" is important, a signal to the subtext of the phrase.

The final seven lines explores the question whether or not she would have not pursued her craft if it meant he would never leave her. Upon first read, it feels a little trite, a little too predictable to me:

… --what would I
have said? I didn't even have an art,
it would come from out of our family's life--
what could I have said: nothing will stop me.

The last line feels a tad rah-rah-sisterhood, rah-rah-artist. But, there is more to it than that. Do we read that his abandoned craft is analogous to hers? That the abandonment of his craft didn't save their marriage any more than if she would have? Or do we read it that, ultimately, this is what she wanted? That she wouldn't go back in time give up her art because not only did the last thirty years of marriage give her great fodder for great art, but this moment, this divorce is also the case?

She's not saying she would chose art over love. She chose art because of love and both were inevitable.

In the poem, she is sacrificing (burning on a pyre) his lost art, while she is creating her own art out of it. In the first-half of the poem she writes

… And laying its
narrow, polished, maple angles
across the kindling, proving for updraft--
good. …

She is conscious here, lays the groundwork for the rest of the poem: her art is fed off of his, even in its absence, even (more so) in its distraction. Good, indeed.

On Reading: Stag's Leap, part two

The second section, "Winter," opens with a poem I keep rereading "Not Going to Him". I'm trying to pinpoint what I find so compelling about this one. Yes, there are some lines I love, "…I am a stunned knower/ of not." and "…on his neck, the scar, doll-saucer of tarnish,/ set in time's throat…" but it's more than just strong images, great word choices.

She builds a momentum that starts just under half-way through the poem and ends fourteen lines later with one long sentence snowballing a conjuring of her (ex) husband through memories of physical details. Her line breaks are interesting and help with the snowball effect. For example, when she breaks a phrase ending the line "and then" reading:

…and up to the nape and then
dive again, as the swells fly
at speed--...

My impulse would have been to end the line at "the nape" and begin the next line with "and then" but I see how this particular enjambment helps build momentum. Clever.

The poem ends with:

…He is alive, he breathes
and moves! My body may never learn
not to yearn for that one, or this could be
a first farewell to him, a life-do-us-part.

I appreciate the sentiment of the division between the body and the mind, the realization that this is the beginning of her knowledge, her acceptance that this is the end, even though part of her will never stop longing.

On Reading: Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds, part one

(What is this? You can read about the impetus behind it here.)

Received Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds for Christmas this year, officially from my father-in-law, but chosen and purchased by my husband.

Here's a confession: I haven't read much Olds. I've read some of her work in anthologies, but I've never read an entire collection and I haven't read any of her recent work at all.

Boxing Day, I curled up with the collection and a cup of tea and began to read. The opening poem "While He Told Me" is stunning, so much so, I read it aloud to my husband. The lines:

Later, when we took off our clothes, I saw
his deep navel, and the cindery lichen
skin between the male breasts, and from
outside the shower curtains's terrible membrane
I called out something like flirting to him,
and he smiled.

are gorgeous. I hope I never forget the phrase "cindery lichen." Perfect.

The poem has a sense of foreboding to it and, having not read the back cover or managed to hear what the book is about (how, I have no idea), I imagined what he told her to be his own terminal prognosis.

I flipped the page and read "Unspeakable"--a poem about their impending divorce and the other woman--then turned to the back cover:

Stag's Leap is a stunningly poignant sequence of poems that tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom.

So I looked over to my husband and asked him what he knew of the book before he bought it. "Nothing," he answered. "You're not trying to tell me something with this, are you?" I asked and then read him the back cover. We laughed somewhat uncomfortably (at least, I did).

I pause. Do I want to read a full collection about someone's divorce? It's Sharon Olds and it won the Pulitzer, so yes, I will read it, but will I enjoy it?

"The Flurry" reinforces my bias against dialogue in poetry.

The next few don't excite me. I begin to wonder if confessional poetry just isn't my thing. I don't search it out and perhaps there is a reason for this.

I read "Stag's Leap" and wonder if it's possible to become the writer-in-residence at a BC winery. I'll name my next book "Red Rooster" or "Quail's Gate" for a case or two.

The final three poems in the first section (January-December) feel stronger. Why is this? Am I breaking through the confessional wall? Why do they speak to me in ways that the middles ones didn't? There are lines in each of them that make me pause (in a good way) that the others didn't. Their endings are especially strong. The final lines of "Known to Be Left": "Have faith,/ old heart. What is living, anyway,/ but dying." I love all of "Object Loss." It feels tight and there are strong, unexpected images to ground the emotions. At first, I wasn't sure about "Poem for the Breasts." The title implied a type of poem I read too often in workshops--a "funny" poem that relies on a "twist" or that is ultimately a joke heading towards a punchline. Meh. Thankfully, "Poem for the Breasts" is not a punchline poem, but one that has depth and insight. It was unexpected and a strong way to end the first section.

On Reading, an experiment

This is an experiment whose idea may be better than the execution, whose execution may not survive more than one post or may become a long running series, so we shall see what happens.

I want to keep notes on my reading, especially the poetry I read. The notes, I hope, will help my craft, will help my reading and my teaching. These notes in this somewhat public space are not meant to be read as reviews, but simply notes: thoughts, ideas, revelations, gut-impulses.

And here I go, cannonball.