Beauty's for Amateurs

I'm enjoying my first alcoholic beverage's since the Doce and I finished reading William Matthews' Time and Money. My god, that's a good damn collection of poetry.

My poetry aesthetic has one simple criteria: I have to understand it. And for the most part I think I understand Matthews' laments about the failure of language, life and death. So maybe, just maybe, I'm getting poetically smarter. I've read a little of his work before for my Contempo Poetry class in the Fall, and I liked it, so I picked this book for my comps. It was a good goddamn choice. I don't typically rave about poetry books, but it's a rare thing for me, actually limited only to Barry Hannah stories and a couple lines is Dorothy Allison's Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (which I liked more than Bastard Out of Carolina...yeah, I said it.), where there were lines where I said "whoa" out loud. Take the title. That's the last line of the entire book of poems that's subject is primarily the futility of life and language. It's such a perfect kind of phrase. And without digging back through the book, he has a line about academia in a poem addressed to Gerald Stern "The louder they quote / Dr. Johnson, the faster I count the spoons." And he has this great line in the poem called "Time" where he says "We live as the direct object of verbs / we hoped we could command." Jesus tap-dancing Christ. Do yourself a favor and read this book.

I also finished reading "The House on Mango Street" recently and I enjoyed that as well. It's something that I want to reread, but it's remarkable what Sandra Cisneros does with flash fiction. The longest story is, what, 800 words, if that? They are nearly poems themselves, but it's such a tight book with absolutely nothing wasted. So it's worth checking out to see what a full and rich world she creates in a little over 100 pages.

Anyways, to mimic Mattie V's post about summer reading...I intend to commit myself to reading a Flannery O'Connor short story a day, along with John Gardener's and Milan Kundera's books about writing novels, on top of readying my comprehensive exams, writing my thesis and reading Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping for the third time (that's becoming a summer tradition I think...I should really buy her other novel). Whew. Good times await.

VIVA EL MUSTACHE