You are currently browsing Kate Soto's articles.
American Poets in the 21st Century
Eds: Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell
Wesleyan Press (2007)
Check out my review of this collection of contemporary poets and writings about them. Online at Artvoice.com.
Jazz & Twelve O’Clock Tales
Wanda Coleman (Black Sparrow Press, 2008)
Check out my review at the Brooklyn Rail.
Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert
(Penguin, 2006)
I have an inner cynic that I’ve cultivated over the years. I don’t do “chick flicks,” romantic comedies, or Renee Zellwiger. Eat, Pray, Love sort of gave me that vibe, so I wasn’t too interested. But a friend gave it to me, along with glowing reviews of it, when I was visiting for a weekend. And I’d finished the book I’d brought. And I needed something light. And so I picked it up.
And then I couldn’t put it down. The good thing about my inner cynic is that it’s humble. It admits to being wrong when it is. This was a really wonderful–and fulfilling–read. It’s a memoir in which Gilbert narrates the experience of a deep depression (divorce, failed love, the aftermath) and then her “year off” afterwards, with travel and soul-searching on the agenda.
She begins her trip in Italy, and writes a wonderful, exuberant section in which she basically eats her way through the country, while learning the joys of the Italian language on her tongue. Having spent a year in Italy myself, and still holding a good dose of nostalgia for my time there, I absolutely loved this section. It was celebratory. It was revelatory. It made me call to mind my own sense of discovery and wonder at being there when I was 21 years old. She has gelato for breakfast and lunch and dinner and gains 30 pounds, and somehow it seems an utterly wonderful thing to give this to yourself: this indulgence in pleasure; this enjoyment of life without guilt or obligation. So much of life, realistically, is about mediating that desire for pleasure. I loved reading about someone who was just giving that to herself, even if only for four months. It also seemed perhaps like a necessary part of her healing process.
The next portion of the trip takes her to an ashram in India, where she goes to the opposite extreme: She strips herself of worldy pleasures and attempts to explore her mind through serious meditation for four months. There was a lot of talk of God/divine, so how much each reader will relate will obviously vary a great deal. But this chapter, too, had much wisdom into the nature of searching. Because she kept her journey very personal, her revelations are insightful, not dogmatic. Along the way she meets many friends and characters, and readers are given a glimpse at how different personalities try to find meaning in life.
And finally, she ends up in Bali, looking for balance. Attempting to integrate pleasure with spiritual discipline, she carves out a life for herself that has friendship, exploration, and ultimately, love. She befriends a medicine man who is good at, in broken Balinese English, teaching her to look at things more simply.
It’s hard to write about the book in an entirely literary way. The writing is good, and sucks the reader into an intimacy with the author. But it is ultimately a personal book, and its resonance, for me, was on a personal rather than literary level. Of course, you have to acknowledge that it’s an immense luxury to take a year off to travel, one that not everyone can afford (she pays for it through an advance for the book itself). But I think the methods she uses to question what she’s looking for in life are really useful. I found myself–at least temporarily–feeling better while reading it, remembering to think about my life more with context in mind.
Run
Ann Patchett
September 2007
HarperCollins
Ann Patchett is not a writer who appeals to my head; she appeals to my heart. Sure, I can intellectually appreciate the artistry with which she crafts her characters, can appreciate the language, can look for symbols and connections in the plot–but that all comes later. While I’m reading one of her books (to date, this is my third), I am sucked in on a visceral level: thinking about it while at work, in conversation; holding the pages open to sneak in a paragraph while the coffee brews or I’m waiting for the elevator. It sticks to my ribs.
I had this reaction to Bel Canto, and (to a lesser degree) repeated it with Run. Set in Boston over a 24-hour period, Run is a novel based on its characters. The cast includes Bernard Doyle, a widower/former mayor of Boston, his three sons (two adopted), the birth mother and her daughter, and an uncle who is an aging priest. The story is about family relationships, which are catapulted by a car accident in the middle of a snowstorm. The boys are reunited with their birth mother and her daughter (their sister).
The character of the sister, Kenya, is the runner of the title: a track prodigy who could be an Olympic hopeful. The passages describing her running are among the most beautiful–she almost flies off the page. But “run” perhaps figures in most directly as an unspoken option that each ponders at one point (at least) in the book. The oldest brother is the one who takes this option, running off to Africa as an escape from early life tragedies. But each thinks it: running away from birth mothers, family expectations, obligations. How each chooses to deal with the desire to escape defines the struggle at the book’s core.
Kenya is really the heart of the book. As soon as she’s introduced, she becomes the focus of both the narration and the family. She is a level-headed and kind eleven-year-old, who is almost unrealistically mature. She’s the central female character (her mother’s in a coma, and the Doyle mother is long-dead). Kenya’s also the moral center: she does the right thing, she is the reason for the reunification of the dad and his oldest, prodigal son.
But the truth is, everyone does the right thing. Perhaps this novel is most accurately a study of what comes of growing up with wealth, patience, and parental devotion. Sibling and parent-child conflicts arise, but are overall benign. The conflicts in the plot do less to create drama than internal exploration. Maybe it’s unrealistic–entirely cast by well-intentioned, loving characters–but maybe it’s just hopeful. And that’s why this book is worth a read: it’s subtle, internal, and ultimately very hopeful.
Manifest Destinies
Laura E. Gomez, NYU Press (October 2007)
Check out my review at PopMatters.
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
By now, you’ve heard of this book. You’ve seen it on Oprah. You’ve read of its Pulitzer in the newspaper. You’ve heard your friends talking about it. And Slate’s book club talking about it. And maybe you’ve read some reviews. You will not come to this book with a clean palate.
At least that’s how I felt when I picked it up, in an airport bookstore on my way to a week’s worth of vacation (which for me means copious book consumption). While reading the back cover, the lady standing next to me points to it and says plainly, “You’ll love it. It’s excellent.”
And you know, I did love it. At least, I liked it greatly. A post-apocalyptic fable set in a nameless world after a nameless disaster and peopled by nameless characters, the story explores what happens when structure is gone. A man and his son scavenge through the wreckage for the basic (and extremely scarce) necessities of life, with absolutely no hope for the future, holding on only to their idea of their own “goodness.” Goodness is a major theme in this novel: What does it mean to be “the good guys”? With a very stripped down approach to dialogue, the man and his son ponder this and hold it as their only value. “Are we still the good guys?” the son asks after his father has made hard choices for their safety. In a system where survival is the absolute only thing you can hope for, rules for how to go about it are laid down based on this sense of good guys vs. bad guys. The young son is the moral center of the book, raising questions about retribution and compassion.
Despite the bleakness surrounding them, the relationship between the father and the son is redemptive. Their love for one another is what makes them the good guys, because they still hold human life as a value. The father concedes to the words of the mother (who takes her own life before the story begins) when she says he wouldn’t be alive without the boy. The boy gives him purpose. And being alive is still something to strive for (which should not be taken for granted in this context).
[Spoiler-ish alert]
In fact, the spine of the book is hope, and the characters’ relationship to hope. The questions that linger for me have to do with how hope is treated at the ending. When the father dies, the boy immediately finds a new family to be with. The family has a mother, father, son, and daughter. There’s a practical discrepency here between reality of the story and possibility of this ending: After witnessing the overwhelming hardship that the father and son endure on their journey, is it likely that a whole family could have found enough provisions to keep itself in tact? I kept asking myself, What’s the point of survival? To endure hardship in order to face nothing but more? How does hope fit into this?
I also began thinking about the appeal of the post-apocalypse story. Besides the desert island genre, it’s really the only context that gives authors the freedom to envision characters without society, and thus without societal rules. I find that desert island/post-apocalypse narratives usually find the authors falling into one of two camps: utopia or dystopia. While the world set out in The Road is certainly dystopic, I would suggest that the novel is ultimately utopic–at least in the sense of human goodness (for the subjectivity of the novel, not the faceless evils that happened before). Without the hope for any material comfort, the only remaining thing to hope for is human good will. And it’s here. In droves. It is tested, but it is here. Is that much hope disingenuous within the world he’s laid out? Maybe. But it makes it very easy to connect with this book.
Their Dogs Came With ThemHelena Maria Viramontes (Atria Press, April 2007)
Read my review of Helena Maria Viramontes’s latest novel at PopMatters.
What’s Your Idea of a Good Time: Letters & Interviews 1977–1985
Bill Berkson and Bernadette Mayer (Tuumba Press, 2006)
Mr. & Mrs. Reason & Desire
“Don’t you think a friend anyway is worth questioning intimately both to egg on friendship…and to find out whatever can be said, what can never be said at the table, or even for shyness of topic, in letters? So, yes, we make sense, if only to each other.”
—Bill Berkson, letter dated May 28, 1981
In 1977, poets Bill Berkson and Bernadette Mayer started writing to each other from opposite coasts. Though this written conversation continues to this day, the bulk of the letters were generated during an eight-year period. What’s Your Idea of a Good Time collects the letters from 1977–1985, which include interview questions, anecdotes, poetry, and, ultimately, an intimate friendship. At times poetic, at times self-conscious, What’s Your Idea of a Good Time reveals two writers as they reveal themselves to one another.
Typical of the New York School with which they are associated, Mayer and Berkson employ a healthy dose of humor and experiment throughout. The questions volley between the absurd and the deeply personal, delving into their lives, philosophies, and poetic practices. Folded inside of colloquial and playful cover letters, the interview questions alternately probe and amuse: What is your secret inner life? How did you become a poet? Do you like Valentine’s Day? Do you know when you are being serious? What’s so great about Dante? Whaddya think Bill, are we nuts or something? How are your teeth? And the answers are equally eclectic: rants, poems, diversions.
Often long, introspective, and private, there’s a monologue quality that seems to be a product of the manually typed letter format they employ, which, unlike E-mail, doesn’t expect an instant response. Bill acknowledges the uniqueness of their process: “Is it the semi-privacy of interview as we’ve proposed that confuses us who rarely write with any thought to the private?” There indeed is a sense of privacy in the letters—that between two friends and that between a writer and the page. Which led me to wonder, could a collection like this be generated today, when communication is so immediate and accessible? Would it instead be splattered with emoticons, abbreviations, and shorthand? As poets, both are acutely conscious of process, and discuss it in their letters. Bill says: “I have so many reactions to this interview process….I want to find out if I agree if ‘narcissism’ (rather than transpersonification?) is what’s going on in the interview/interviewee mind. I don’t think listening to one’s own mind is narcissistic. But writing from the mind of a transpersonified interviewee does have a funny Shanghai’d mirror-quality of extrapersonal disclosure. Do we really care if it’s us saying these things?” (90). This method of exchange captures a level of candor that’s not in the same way possible in the writings they create for public consumption.
It is when they are least paying attention to process, however, that this candor becomes poetic. In a letter dated July 11, 1982, written from Lake Buel, Mayer reveals her frustrations with being a poet, with culture and politics, with writing. She says, “I think the odds against writing our works are easy, it’s the odds against knowing what to write that are so great. One can write and write and write (well maybe this is my problem) & still never feel a part of anything, that one is doing anything or even being read.” This letter addresses much of what is being explored in this book: the way these two are figuring out how to live as poets in the world. In the course of discussing their daily lives, readers learn about the weather in New York City (from Bernadette); the flora in Bolinas, California (from Bill); their children’s birthdays; their infidelities; dental visits—but also their hopes for their own work; and their reactions to the work being made around them. Written largely while Bernadette Mayer was the director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, there’s also a good deal of gossip in the book. They ask each other to describe the characters of other poets they know, such as Joe Brainard and Ron Padgett, offering a rare insight into the poetry community of the time.
The relationship between reason and desire is at the heart of their exchange. The two discuss their struggles with maintaining a reasonable life (i.e., day job and families) while also fulfilling their desires to live as artists. Bernadette’s view: “I guess the real question is how can anyone ever achieve the right relation of reason & desire (which sounds hideous!) & at the same time get everything that’s desirable. Bullshit. It’s all manners & what Henry James calls ‘a heroism of the perfunctory’ meaning slipping your big desires through in a small way, a hallway or stairwell perhaps….Reason sits and desire moves over a little closer or gets up, goes to the nearest door & beckons.” One letter from Bill sparks a curiosity in Bernadette, who begins investigating the idea of utopia. This thread leads to the writing of Bernadette’s Utopia, self-published in 1984. Good Time is a friendship, and it’s a work-in-progress; readers are invited to enjoy the pleasure that the poets themselves take in it. Bernadette asks Bill, “Do you think writing poetry has to do with (a) desire (to please)?” And he responds, “The answer is yes, I love to please, and in writing I love to be pleased by (just) writing.” (Bill)
Ultimately, that pleasure is what drives these letters. The project was initially sparked by the question of the title, and more than anything, there is the sense that they are indeed having a good time with one another—there’s flirtation and fun underlying even the more serious threads. When I entered the title into a search engine, I found responses to its question along the lines of “hanging out with friends,” “getting drunk and then going cow tipping,” and “passing a pleasant evening with a woman whose butt looks great in jeans.” For Bernadette and Bill, however, the answer to this question has more to do with friendship and creativity—and the pleasure they get from writing. Bernadette’s response to the question sums it up: EVERYBODY SLEEPS IN ROYAL BLUE SATIN SHEETS LIKE CUCUMBERS IN A BOX OF SNOW.
The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide
Robert Pinsky (FSG, 1998)
This is a great introduction or refesher course for scansion and metrics in poetry. It’s definitely not the most in-depth exploration, but it does serve as a useful “brief guide,” as suggested in the title. Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of the US, endows the book with an exuberant love of language that makes it quite enjoyable to read.
Sounds of Poetry introduces scansion terms and refers to many different types of poems to reinforce the metrics. Despite the abundance of free verse in contemporary poetry, I still think it’s essential to learn how to scan a poem. Being conscious of sound as device makes it easier to understand what’s at play, and how form interacts with content. Pinsky also makes this point, and demonstrates how iambic pentameter is often still present in free verse. He uses Allen Ginsberg’s Howl as an example, finding pentameter even in this most fiercly free-verse poem: “I saw the best minds of my generation/ Destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.”
His prose is geared more for the novice poetry reader, and at times I felt he overworded concepts to make them easier. Nevertheless, it’s a quick, enjoyable romp through poetic sounds–and how to understand them.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Lynne Truss
If you like diatribe, you’ll love this book. Comprised of 85 percent Truss’s frustration with common usage blunders, and 15 percent useful information, Eats, Shoots & Leaves works best when it’s talking about history of punctuation. Otherwise, it may grate on your nerves–it did on mine. Truss is a pretty hard-nosed prescriptivist. Her position is one of horror rather than wonder at the permutations language is taking as it evolves. Being in the wonder camp, I certainly think that there are some lamentable bastardizations, but also some exciting ones. And either way, this is the VERY thing that makes language an amazing system: constant adaptability.
Of course, I agree it’s important to understand the basic tools and learn to use them correctly. I am certainly happy that there’s a call to pay closer attention to punctuation. Punctuation is a wonderful tool to aid clarity and meaning in a sentence. Her point that one small comma can change meaning significantly is dead on.
However, British usage and American usage of punctuation are so different that American readers would be doing themselves a disservice by adhering to all of the rules set out in her book. For instance, Americans enclose most punctuation inside quotations; Brits let them float out in space: “in space”. vs “in space.” Americans also use serial commas (“Oxford commas” acc. to Truss), which in my mind are extremely useful and clarity-endowing. She almost concedes on this matter, but stubbornly holds British usage in higher esteem merely, in my opinion, because it’s British. I think that the caveat should have been made more clear that Americans and Brits use punctuation differently. She pokes fun and snubs American punctuation (without explaining its logic), while making her own punctuation mistakes throughout.
Why was this book such a bestseller? I think people respond well to cantankerous “sticklers” (Truss’s word) who assert their superior knowledge of a subject. Mostly, however, it feels like a vehicle for Truss to take her vengeance on all those misusers of the apostrophe on take-out menus and deli signs everywhere.
A great article on the book:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/06/28/040628crbo_books1
