Tag Archives: Shakespeare

Book Luck

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One of my neighbors is organizing a block-wide yard sale.  I still don’t know most of my neighbors on this block so it sounds like it might be fun to participate.  And I do love getting rid of things.  Clutter drives me crazy.  Right now I’m forcing myself to keep staring down at my computer.  Looking up would mean acknowledging the fact that I’m a failure in maintaining my own sanity and a modicum of order in this house.

I was incredibly happy when I discovered you can rent a dumpster and have it delivered curbside and then whisked away a week later.  No questions asked.  I’m fairly regular in dropping shopping bags of stuff off at Goodwill.  We clean out dressers, closets and the open surfaces in a haphazard fashion, but we do comb through the detritus.  The girls have shed toys, dolls, blocks and books that they’ve outgrown.  This is weird.  We just don’t have many toys around anymore.

But the one thing I just keep accumulating is poetry books.  There’s a scene Ann Patchett describes in Truth & Beauty where she’s helping Lucy Grealy clean out her apartment.  Lucy tells Ann that she can’t get rid of any of the poetry books because it’s bad luck.  I thought, “Yes, that’s exactly right.  Maybe each book of poetry is a talisman.  It takes too much damn hard work to put one of these together when only a handful of people buy  them.  That’s why I don’t get rid of poetry.”  So my shelves of poetry, alphabetized by author and then by title, are bursting and will remain that way until I have my own library with one of those cool ladders on wheels that you can shuttle back and forth among all the glorious volumes.  Anyway, you never truly finish reading a book of poetry anymore than a song becomes defunct after one listen.

Going back through my poetry collection is a way of remembering people, places and my life.  Oh yeah–the Elizabeth Bishop Complete Poems dates back to college and has my loopy, scrawl of notes.  I remember buying Kinell’s Book of Nightmares to read on a flight to NY, thinking it made me look cool.  And there’s the tiny book of Shakespeare’s sonnets that I carried around the summer I couldn’t write.  I figured memorizing some fine sonnets would count for something on the muse’s tally.

I’m including Bishop’s poem One Art in this post.  It’s all about losing, but not to worry- the books are safe.

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop 
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Twitt

The Other Side of Tired is Manic

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Earlier today I was reciting Shakespearean sonnets for Izzy until she squealed for mercy and Amalia was cracking up.  Izzy’s class is starting a unit on WS.  While Amalia was doing back walkovers and being told to straighten her knees and point her toes, I read a little Horace.  I can still hear Amalia’s coach Olga yelling, “Knees and toes, Amalia, knees and toes.”  Amalia and I started singing on the way home–you know the head, shoulders, knees and toes song.  It morphed into shed, holders, teas and nose.  By the time we got home, we were searching for another rhyme for nose and come up with words that are inherently funny.  Izzy thought we’d lost our minds.

All was good and funny for a while.  Once we stopped laughing, I felt like crying.  I’m on the rollercoaster again.  It’s not a serious mental condition.  It’s just one of the symptoms that crops up when I’m not writing poetry.

I never did get to reading the other day.  Instead, I put the brakes on, watched reruns of Law and Order and ate cinnamon toast until I had to pick the girls up from school.  I didn’t even feel guilty or disgusted with myself. In fact, I was bummed that it was a half day at school.  I never did find out who ran over the attractive parole officer.

Today I put on lipstick and felt extremely competent until I read the intro to the book on Horace.  There was a brief account of A.E. Housman lecturing on one of the odes.  After Housman analyzed the poem, he simply read it aloud to his students.  The students thought they saw tears in Housman’s eyes.  This is from the intro by  J.D. McClatchy–”That,” they remember him saying in the tone of a man betraying a secret, “I regard as the most beautiful poem in ancient literature.”

I love stories like this.  Housman must have studied and taught that poem over and over.  Certainly, he’d read it numerous times. It still had the power to move him to tears.  You just can’t beat that for a long lasting punch–a poem some two thousand years old brings tears to the eyes of a tough old professor in front of his students.  I want that.

My ego is not so large as to suppose for even a moment that I’ll ever write anything as century-spanning as Horace.  What I want is to be moved like that.  To always let poetry have that power over me.  And it does, except lately poetry’s been relegated to the very bottom of the To-Do list.  Is it too dramatic to say that it feels like a piece of me is missing?  Finding the balance between motherhood and writing feels impossible tonight.

Ah yes.  Perfect timing.  The cranberry bread (from a mix) for tomorrow’s bake sale needs to come out of the oven.  Thus ends this post.

Twitt