A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Karen Rigby Explores the World in Chinoiserie

by 2 Comments

karen rigby chinoiserie

When Karen Rigby asked me to review her book, Chinoiserie, I had no idea how much of the world would be contained in this slim volume. Winner of the 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize and published by Ahsahta Press in Boise, ID, I thought the book would be more, well, Idaho. Being from (and having fled) that beautiful but somewhat isolated state, I was delighted to find a rich, cosmopolitan collection of poems.

Why Book Cover Design Matters

We all judge books by their covers. There is only so much time in the world and there are a lot of books. A lot of time smaller presses don’t have the cash to get great designs or they don’t have someone on staff with a strong eye for design. I don’t know the story behind the cover design for Chinoiserie, but I do know that the organic white shapes against a lush red background is gorgeous. The book feels Asian and yet it’s reminiscent of European toiles and Islamic designs as well. It’s simple and yet it’s transnational. Much like the poetry itself.

This attention to detail continues on the inside of the book with a leaf of vellum before the title page. The title page itself is one of the most attractive I’ve ever seen. It boldly and cleanly declares the title across two facing pages with two lines of Rigby’s poetry, “Dear Reader, what I started to tell you / had something to do with hunger” spanning the bottom of the title. No illustration, just that inviting text.

I don’t usually spend a lot of time talking about the design of books, and I don’t want you to get the idea that the outside is more important or interesting than the inside, but aesthetics do matter. I recently went through this design process with a book of writing prompts I co-authored that’s forthcoming from Write Bloody, another small press. We hated the first design. Actually, it was pretty cool, but it said all the wrong things about our book. I’m glad we spoke openly and honestly with the press. I know the budget is tight, but in just one turnaround, we got a cover that’s inviting instead of scary and I’m really happy with the results.

What’s important is that the book design of Chinoiserie made me want to linger over Rigby’s poetry, so let’s do that now…

A World of Poetry

I knew this was the right book for me when I saw that it was divided in three sections each introduced by an epigraph from a Spanish-speaking poet. Rigby quotes from Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, and Octavio Paz. Epigraphs are amazingly important to a book and I sometimes forget that, skimming over them. But here, Rigby reminds me that it’s not just the words in the epigraph that are important, but the other details as well. Because she chose poets rather than essayists or definitions, I stayed in the poetic sphere of my brain as I was reading. By embedding the epigraphs in the text of the book rather than placing them somewhere before the table of contents, she brought them in closer relation to her own work. And because of who she chose, poets that I personally love, I felt closer to the text–more invested in it.

But this isn’t the only way that Rigby brings the world into her poems. Her subject matter spans the globe. As you might imagine, I love that. She wraps her words around subjects as diverse as Pittsburgh and borscht, as international as the film of The Lover and women harvesting lavender. What could be disjointed instead weaves together into a gorgeous portrait of what it means to observe the world carefully.

Unexpected Imagery

“her body as shorthand / for what his body mistook for love” – Karen Rigby, “The Lover”

One of the things I loved most about this book is the way Rigby uses words to make me look closer at the everyday. It’s something we’re all supposed to do as writers, but it sometimes feels damned hard. But Rigby’s use of phrases like “lizard-dark” make creating that perfect image look easy and I want to know more about that creepy night. When she writes about “a matchbook / missing half its lashes” I know exactly what she means and I wish I could have put those words to the image. And there’s an undercurrent of flirtation there that makes me think of all the phone numbers ever written into matchbooks.

Sometimes these images turn into full-on scenes when Rigby creates phrases like “Places you meet turn semaphore” and I picture both the signalling flags and the metaphor behind it and a story starts to form from those few words. When when she writes about The Lover, “hunger traced the Mekong” I can feel the sensuality in that line and also the geopolitical import. Because Duras is one of my favorites and I’ve watched the film over and over, I remember images of the older Chinese man tracing his fingers over the young, bony, French girl and think of the many forms of hunger.

Rigby makes me want to spend more time digging into my own images and making them this evocative and concise.

The Power of Repetition

I love repetition in its many forms from anaphora to epistrophe. I’ve written about it before and will continue to because of its incantatory magic. What Rigby shows me in “Orange/Pittsburgh” is the power of implied repetition. Let me explain, but first, let me show you. In the third stanza of this poem, Rigby writes, “Orange is girder / & rusted flange, citrine” and then in the middle of the sixth, seventh, and eighth stanzas that “Orange is” returns like this…

“Orange is Japanese carp
beneath the tattoo needle,

habaneros sweating
in their grocery bins.
French horns warming

on the south cathedral lawn.”
– Karen Rigby “Orange/Pittsburgh

See how your mind fills in “Orange is” before “habaneros sweating” and again before “French horns warming”? I don’t know if this spell works because I’m so conditioned to rules of three or if including “Orange” in the title is what makes the magic, but I loved the tension between the words I was hearing as I read this poem and the words on the page. It opened a whole new space of reading for me.

Although some of the poems in this collection were too spare for me to get inside, I will return to this book over and over to learn from Rigby’s use of language and to see if they open to me. And I hereby vow not to prejudge literary products from my home state nearly as harshly in the future.

On Lyn Hejinian and Reading Out of Your Depth

by 4 Comments

my life and my life in the nineties - lyn hejinianA couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a friend about our mutual interest in Buddhism. She recommended I read Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha and I asked if she’d read the works of Thích Nhất Hạnh. We agreed that neither of us really understood him, but I said what I like most about his work is precisely that I don’t understand it and that every time I re-read one of his books, I take from it what I need that day, regardless of what’s on the page. That’s how I felt reading My Life and My Life in the Nineties by Lyn Hejinian.

Drowning in a Book

“I imagine a foreign language to be like a thin stick over a creek, one must run on it with great speed so it won’t have time to break and without stopping for a second so one won’t lose one’s balance.” – Lyn Hejinian

I’d been told that My Life and My Life in the Nineties was a difficult book. I don’t think that’s strictly accurate. What the book is is fragmentary. Each of the poems or sections or essays, whatever you want to call them seems at first to be a series of disconnected sentences. But I ran head first into the book, determined to achieve that perfect balance of comprehension and enjoyment. I found myself immersed in a collection of reminiscences, and even though I could not put together the narrative, I could feel Hejinian’s life moving forward in time as I progressed through the sections.

Finding Inspiration Anywhere

“I can type faster when I don’t hear my hands.” – Lyn Hejinian

As I was reading into this book, looking for that narrative I’m so accustomed to, I found myself grasping onto individual sentences but not in the way you’d think. Instead of clutching a gnarled sentence for meaning as I would with a writer like Faulkner, I was holding onto some of Hejinian’s clear sentences as they pulled me up out of the ocean of her book and into the surface of my own writing.

Let me explain that. Normally, when the style of a book pulls you out of the narrative, that’s a bad thing for flow and surrendering to the fictional dream, and all so on. But because I was happily wandering through this book without really knowing where I was, I was glad to stop when I encountered a sentence that reminded me of something from my own life.

If I’d been in a writing frame of mind, My Life would have been the single greatest set of writing prompts I’d ever encountered. Lines like, “Because children will spill food, one needs a dog” sparked memories from my childhood and I had a visceral feeling of having food licked off of my face. Different sentences will speak to different people, but over and over as I read the book, I could feel long-lost memories igniting.

What’s the Difference Between Prose and a Prose Poem?

“Consciousness is durable in poetry.” – Lyn Hejinian

I’m not a student of poetics, but what Hejinian showed me in My Life and My Life in the Nineties is that one big difference between prose poems and prose is whether narrative is a main thrust of the writing or not. The passages in the second part of the book, My Life in the Nineties, contained more contiguous sentences in the same narrative stream and the section read faster for me, but this book is still for me much more about the language than the narrative.

Another thing I came to appreciate in this book is the way Hejinian uses particular sentences as refrains. I was well into the book before I realized that some of her sentences felt familiar. I started reading closer and marking the ones I recognized. I couldn’t discern an intentional pattern, but they did feel like a key to another way to read this book. It was as though those sentences were the triangles on a sewing pattern and when I pulled the writing into three dimensions I would connect those triangles and appreciate a completely other creation.

“Please note that in my attempt to increase the accuracy of these sentences and the persistence and velocity with which they proceed, I’m pursuing change while trying to outrun the change that’s pursuing me.” – Lyn Hejinian

Reading out of your depth can be frustrating or it can be the most wonderful thing ever. I highly recommend that you pick a day where you have nothing pressing and the world will leave you alone, and then pick up a book you always thought was beyond your ken. Read the book for whatever strikes you. There is no wrong answer and there will be no test at the end. Let me know what you discover.

If you need some fresh inspiration, pick up a copy of My Life and My Life in the Nineties from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Blowing Apart Language in Joie de Vivre by Lisa Jarnot

by 1 Comment

What I wanted to do this evening is hide out in my basement and continue to ignore my writing. I had a really wonderful burst of creativity in Port Townsend two weeks ago, but it’s easier to keep that notebook closed than to actually look at the poems this evening (writers, this is not how you finish a project). Anyway, I made myself flip through the stack of book I’m planning to review and in it I found Joie de Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012 by Lisa Jarnot, and I’m so glad I did. From the very first page her poems shocked me and engaged me and made me want to read on. Now I know why I keep finding this book on the floor of my office–the fates have been throwing it at me for weeks, but I wasn’t ready to catch it. Here’s how this book shook me right out of my funk.

Step One: Read a Book Aloud

“I am ebbing in and out, I am dreaming dreams I hardly know and have tattoos, I am dreaming dreams outside of dreams and fish tanks and the spanishest of music.” – Lisa Jarnot, from “Sea Lyrics”

Reading a book aloud is a luxury. It’s slower and can be taxing on the vocal cords. It also requires solitude (or patience from your housemates). But reading aloud, especially a certain kind of poetry, is worth the effort. I found myself slipping into a southern drawl as I pronounced each of Jarnot’s words. I learned things about the way her poems worked when I spoke more or different words than are on the page. While I wouldn’t recommend reading War and Peace aloud anytime soon, reading a really good poem (or book of poetry) is a great way to (re)awaken your love of language.

Step Two: Throw Your Sentences in a Blender

“Blood in my eyes followed by truck in motel. either severely or proper. followed by police activity. followed by truck in. followed by followed by. followed by truck in motel. at the library. at the truck in motel. at the of.” – Lisa Jarnot, from “blood in my eyes”

This is not the right book for a lot of people, but the poems in this book, especially the selections from Some Other Kind of Mission accosted me with language. And I was grateful. They are filled with jarring compositions and staccato, unfinished sentences that leave room for me to leak into their interstices and complete the stories. I felt challenged by these poems and I wanted to hate them for their rawness and simplicity, but I kept falling in love with the richness of their repetition and the way the sentences evolved. They rocked my world and made me consider each word and each phrase and each mark of punctuation in a way that will help me write and edit both more carefully and more creatively in the future.

The repetition isn’t always as artful, and “molecules, selling crawfish” went too far toward the comical for me.

“Molecules, selling crawfish. selling selling crawfish. selling crawfish selling. wrecked in crawfish selling highway.” – Lisa Jarnot, from “molecules, selling crawfish”

But when the repetition works (which is more often than not) the anaphora and epistrophe and straight up repetition is pure magic. And in poems like “Greyhound Ode” the whimsy works better for me.

Step Three: Leave Your Work Open for Interpretation

Something else I loved about this book was the way the selected poems, again, especially those from Some Other Kind of Mission, bled into one another. There were no titles on the pages of that section and Jarnot uses unusual words like “meticules” and “tern” and “firs” over and over so that the poems can be read as one continuous narrative. But they are also individually constructed and each can stand on its own. I loved how that engaged me as a reader and I could feel myself making choices about how I wanted to read the book.

I didn’t love the poems later in the book as much as I loved the early ones, but I can see how Jarnot has been evolving over the years and playing with new ideas and forms. I appreciate a writer’s willingness to change and grow even while maintaining a few signatures. For Jarnot I’d say those signatures are that gorgeously evolving repetition of phrase and her ability to create images like “upon the moon in silver deep.”

What writers shake you out of your writing funk or challenge you to rethink everything? I’m going to build a list for nights like these.

If you need to shake up the way you see language, pick up a copy of Joie de Vivre from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

A Tightrope of Tension in Life of Pi by Yann Martel

by 2 Comments

life of pi - yann martelI’m pretty sure I’m the last person on the planet to read Life of Pi by Yann Martel, but if I’m wrong and you haven’t yet read it, skip this review until you have. It will be full of spoilers and I hate to ruin good books. What impressed me most about this book was Martel’s ability to maintain tension in a novel that is literally lost at sea.

Introduction

I stayed away from this book for a long time because I like to read books on my own terms without any hype or intervention. And when people would tell me, “It’s this amazing book about a boy on a lifeboat with a tiger, but it’s really about God,” I thought it sounded weird but kept the name for future reference. When the Ang Lee film came out, I could see that it was going to be beautiful and knew I had to see it on the big screen (which meant being subject to Hollywood’s schedule). The movie was stunning and I’m not sorry I saw it, but I also think seeing it before reading the book robbed me of some of the book’s brilliance. I picked up the book this week because I wanted a story, something I could rely on.

Let’s talk about that paragraph I just wrote. It’s long, ambling. It covers a lot of time but doesn’t really have a center. The ideas are there, but it’s not tight and it could definitely be edited down. I bet you even skimmed part of it. I would have. In contrast, Martel’s intro to Life of Pi is tight. The first 50 pages of the book cover all the backstory of an Indian family with a zoo who is moving the zoo animals and themselves to the Western Hemisphere. It covers the story of a boy’s life and his experience as a religious omnivore. It even has an essay on the relationship between animals and humans. But it’s not messy, it’s enthralling.

So how does Martel do it? How does he keep the reader’s interest as he lays all this groundwork. I think it’s precisely the messiness that is so fascinating. But he does have an organizing principle–he uses the author’s introduction to frame for us that this is a story that will make us believe in God (a pretty encompassing idea anyway) and then he lets Pi Patel speak. And it’s no accident that the authorial interjections are more frequent at the beginning, he’s still framing the story for us and interpreting what these divergent threads might someday form, but once we’re hooked, he lets us hear directly from Pi.

Promising a Happy Ending

Would you read a book about a boy who has lost his entire family adrift on the ocean and in mortal danger every minute of every day? I wouldn’t. And I love depressing books. Page after page you’d have no idea if he’s going to get saved or not and eventually your hope would wear thin. You might abandon it before the boy gets saved or eaten.

So why do we read and love this book? Why do we recommend it to friends? Martel very smartly controlled the emotional stakes of the story. We know from the beginning that Pi survives. We don’t know how and we’re still curious as hell about this tiger thing, but we are free to hope. The most ingenious part of this emotional buoying for me was how just before we actually see Pi get lost at sea, Martel describes his family today, and then he writes, “This story has a happy ending.” Wow.

Would I suggest you do this with any other book? Absolutely not. But in a story where despair could be truly overwhelming, it was a genius move.

Keeping the Tension at Sea

Pi is adrift for a very long time. That’s another tricky proposition for a writer. How on earth do you keep readers engaged in what must be the most mind-numbing of days? Here Martel divides up the experience into little sections and each is tightly wound around one idea. There is the quest to get fish and observations of birds. He includes descriptions of distilling and collecting water and other essential knowledge for survival at sea. Oh, and there’s the tiger, Richard Parker.

Richard Parker is essential to maintaining tension out at sea, but even that could get dull for a reader over time. What was interesting for me was how Martel shifted the relationship between Pi and the animals. We get to experience with him the initial uncertainty, the pervasive fear, and the eventual reigning and caretaking. But even when Richard Parker is “tamed,” he’s still a wild animal capable of anything, and Martel doesn’t let us forget that either. All it takes is one swipe of that large claw to refocus our innate survival instincts.

But it’s About God?

What I did lose on the ocean in the book that I did not lose in the movie was the sense of God. At the end I do prefer the allegory to the events retold with human players. But I missed the direct connection with religions that Pi had been experiencing early in the book. And maybe the point is that God is everything and we can’t filter God through a religion. Maybe I need to think about it some more.

I’ve heard told that you know you are done editing a book when you run through one draft and add in commas and on the next draft you’re taking them back out. Life of Pi is that tightly edited and I loved that about it. In some ways the organization of a book that can have exactly 100, naturally segmented chapters with nothing missing and nothing superfluous makes me believe in perfection, order, and destiny. And maybe that’s the part of God I’m looking for right now.

If you still haven’t read Life of Pi, pick up a copy from Bookshop.org. Then read it when you are ready for it. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

My Bookstore, My Community: A Love Note to Indie Booksellers and My Dad

by 4 Comments

With any luck, the Postal Service delivered a package to my dad yesterday. He will have opened it by now and found my standard Father’s Day gift to him, a book. I send him books instead of ties because books are a language my dad and I share, and this year I was especially excited to be able to send him My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop edited by Ronald Rice. This book helped me understand just what it is I love about independent bookstores and even better, it filled me with happy memories of a childhood spent in bookstores. So this post is for you, Dad. Happy Father’s Day!

The Bookstore I Was Raised On

I couldn’t possibly tell you the first time I entered Twice Sold Tales in Moscow, Idaho. It was a used bookstore in a craftsman cottage on the edge of downtown. The store was filled, and I mean packed, with books (in shelves and piled on the floor) and because it was my first bookstore, the one my dad took me to often, it all seemed wonderfully normal. In fact, the office where I write today has many things in common with that little house (including book piles in inappropriate places and a closet turned into a bookshelf).

Before I remember my dad introducing me to Betty, the owner, I remember him loading stacks of paperbacks on her counter. She would tabulate the number of Xs stamped on the top of each book (each denoted $0.25 of value) and then pull out a plastic recipe box filled with 3×5 cards and subtract my dad’s purchase from the amount of credit he had on file. One summer, about the time I became engrossed in horror novels, I started going to the bookstore on my own. I was there so often that Betty offered me a job, to be paid in credit. I never did take her up on that, but I loved taking books out one day and returning them for credit the next. I used that store like my personal library and I was glad to pay the fee.

My dad took me to other bookstores too. There was the Waldenbooks in the mall where we waited in a long line (there must have been 20 people) every time a new Patrick McManus came out. It was such a family tradition that my brother and I have both laid claims on my dad’s stash of signed McManus books. We frequented Brused Books in Pullman and often ran into Bruce, the owner, at garage sales around town as he was replenishing his inventory. We spent time in BookPeople of Moscow (even before it moved across the street) although I never got to know Bob as well as the others. It’s a shame because I think he and I would have a lot to talk about now, but I wasn’t ready for that bookstore just yet.

We even had bookstores as destinations when we traveled including Half Price Books in the U District in Seattle (and every other used bookstore on the Ave). And of course, Powell’s in Portland. But Twice Sold Tales holds the most special place in my memory.

My Bookstore(s) Today

Now I live in Seattle and am surrounded by bookstores. It’s easy for me to go to Half Price Books in the U District or Capitol Hill (which is closing or moving) or Lynnwood. I still take my dad there when he visits. He thinks I’m humoring him, but really it’s for me. And not just because he sometimes pays for my armloads of books. I have boxes of books in the basement that I trade in on a semi-annual basis, but I get cash instead of little Xs on a card, so it’s not quite as romantic and the money often gets frittered away.

Bookstores are changing and so am I. The art books that draw my husband and me to the University Bookstore on the Ave are fewer in number. I rarely visit Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park (which has the best essays section) since my writing group up there dissolved. I nip over to Ravenna Third Place as much for the cafe as for the books. The monster Barnes and Noble at U Village that so excited me when I moved here has since closed, and the Barnes and Noble at Northgate (within walking distance), that I was thrilled to see go in now prominently features a Nook display next to the toy section. I most often do not find the books I’m looking for there.

The bookstore I most love is Elliott Bay Books. For over a year I held a weekly writing date with myself there. I wrote more letters than fiction, but that was good too, and invariably I came away with a book (or five) to add to those piles of books on my floor and in my shelves. I’m shy, though, and I don’t know the booksellers like I’d like to. I recognize their faces and they are always kind to me, but it’s hard for me to build relationships with many people at once. Maybe I’m waiting for my dad to introduce them to me (or me to them). And recently, I’ve been really busy, so I’ve been allowing myself to order a hard to find book from Amazon instead of asking at the bookstore like I know I should. Yes, I was seduced by Prime and I hate myself for it.

My Bookstore, the Book

What I loved about this sampler platter of writers’ favorite independent bookstores is that it reminded me of how central bookstores had been in my life. It showed me the community I was allowing to slip by not engaging with it. There are writers you’ll recognize in this book (Wendell Berry, Isabel Allende, Ann Patchett, and more) and some you won’t. Each writer gets a few pages to tell you about their favorite bookstore and four of the stores I named above are featured. There’s a kind of stilted insider lingo that develops in some of the essays (maybe because these writers know they are writing for devoted readers) that it took me some time to get over. It was good to read about other parents who have instilled a love for reading and bookstores in their kids, and that I’m not the only one who gets her books paid for.

But even when the stories start to sound the same (and some are wildly different), the collective voice is saying something I needed to hear. The bookstore, especially the independent bookstore, is the center of my community. It’s where I grew up and where I learned to love books. And it needs me to stay alive.

This book made me trek over to Elliott Bay Books where I bought an armload of books and then walked over to the park, sat in the sun, and read a book by Pico Iyer whose work I first encountered in My Bookstore. And that hour I took for myself to browse and read was a moment of stepping back into myself when I really, really needed it. And I’m grateful to all the people who have supported Elliott Bay Books so it could be there when I needed it. I will return the favor.

I learned this week that Write Bloody will be publishing a book of writing prompts I co-authored with Rebecca Bridge. Maybe that will force me to go in to Elliott Bay and all my other wonderful local stores and introduce myself so I can start building those bookseller relationships that my dad has in his home town.

Why Independent Bookstores?

If you don’t know what the fuss is about Amazon, you’ll understand by the end of this book. You can also read the Melville House blog. A quick summary is that they (legally) evade taxes, squeeze profit margins, and don’t exist in a physical space. I do buy from Amazon (movies, bags for dog poop, and other random items), but when I was looking for an affiliate program, a way to make a small amount of money off the many loving hours I put into this blog, I chose to work with Powell’s instead. And I realize that Half Price Books isn’t an independent bookstore either, but my family comes from Austin and my brother-in-law worked at the store in the U District for years, and I still know people there, so it still feels like home.

About My Dad

My dad’s coming to town next weekend. I’ll let him pretend he’s dragging me to Half Price and Elliott Bay if he wants. I’ll even let him pay for my armloads of books. Or maybe I’ll pay for his. I hope he’ll read My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop (which I purchased at Third Place) and remember some of the same wonderful moments I did.

Thank you, Dad, for sharing with me your love of books and bookstores. We’ll miss the Third Place Semi-annual Sale (June 15-16), but we should check out Magus and all the others next weekend and then Tattered Cover in September.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.