More on the poetry front
As for great poetry out there, two collections now out show the vast expanse the ageless form now inhabits.
The Sea At Truro, by Poughkeepsie-based Nancy Willard, is a classic collection all around, from Knopf, that not only demonstrates the Vassar professor’s stature, but takes us all on an invigoratingly fresh inner journey towards the acceptance of mortality that enlivens so many of us at our advancing ages, while simultaneously exploring the limitations of memory as we go.
Consider her shorter work, “Some Things Should Never Be Written Down:”
Some things should never be written down.
The lovesick hummingbord’s whistling for love;
the tide of sleep humming toward me
and baited with whispers, what he said,
what she said, and my glad heart
packing its dreams for the trip to morning;
the ring of my mother’s name
when my grandfather called to her three days
after he died, and she with her arms full
of wind-washed laundry
just freed from the line.
The book, with a stunning cover image by Willard’s husband, the photographer Eric Lindbloom, steps forth from big subjects such as passings and aging, disappearing and resurging memories, to contained imagery and, finally, a section of sea-oriented and other natural works that allow us to end with a trilogy of sorts, “Shedding The Human,” “Advice To A Traveler,” and “Grave” that leave one ready to start the entire book a second time. As all poetry always has done, at its best.
But Michael Ruby’s new Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices, from Barrytown-based Station Hill Press, definitely does not do. This strange work — made up of equal sections that list 1,628 random memories Ruby jotted down in editorial story sheets he compiled during his many years working the copy desk at the Wall Street Journal, a decade’s worth of dreams written down throughout the 1990s, and a series of “poems” created from the thoughts one has just before falling asleep (which he trained himself to wake up and record as a means of building up his own experimental writing chops) — may be among the most epic pieces of literature in years.
“I first became aware of these memories in my twenties, but it wasn’t until my mid-thirties that I really paid attention to them,” he writes in an intro to the memories section of the book that also explains his title’s referencing of Carl Jung, among other matters. “A cascade began when I learned that my wife, Louisa, was pregnant with our first child, Charlotte, in 1993. A few years later, when I was taking care of identical-twin babies, Emily and Natalie, as many as three memories would pop into my mind while I was changing a single diaper. I tended to view them as memories being killed off by the brain. This was the last time they would enter my consciousness — at least until I short-circuited the dynamic. Maybe so many memories popped up because a powerful new experience was killing out an old experience, taking over its ‘engram,’ or whatever.”
At first this all felt like Kerouac’s experiments in Visions of Cody mashed up with much of what Joyce was attempting over his career. But then the experience allowed new sensations to build up…not only a sense of Ruby’s life, but all of ours. In the end, this great work makes one yearn, and even try, to start such experiments with the depths of one’s own consciousness, subconscious, and possibly even our souls.
Architectural Inventions:
Finally, speaking of deep soul in a visible format, there’s Matt Bua and Maxilimian Goldfarb’s great new book, Architectural Inventions: Visionary Drawings, built from a website they’ve been managing (and from which several exhibits planned and/or implemented) that seeks to archive some truly out-there planning and envisioning going on. Beautifully printed by London-based Lawrence King Publishing, and gladly adorned, individually, by the authors/artists on request, the work came together when Bua and Goldfarb started spreading a call for entries throughout the world, looking for any visual attempts to define new means of envisioning architecture, landscape planning or other means of changing/adapting/furthering our role/existence on this mortal coil we call Earth.
“A couple of years ago, a conversation began at the intersection of two related projects,” the two write of this book’s genesis in an introductory statement. “Matt Bua was developing his improvised buildings on a wooded site in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. His guiding principle was to use only found and discarded materials to create a series of uncoded, sculptural buildings that would provide various functions, both applied and symbolic. Max Goldfarb had recently organized the exhibition ‘Bivouac’ focusing on works that materialize in the territory between model and dwelling, drawing together an uneasy community of expeditionary artists whose works often approximate habitable structures, serving as prototypical responses to aggravated social conditions. In both cases, the ability to consider, by experience, the concepts generated was the result of renderings of ideas pushed into fast construction, rather than being slowly and safely filtered through stages of cumbersome planning and production.”
Suffice it to say that the results, here, are as fun as finger painting, as provocative as any history of art or architecture, and as beautiful as any painting, photograph, recording or book seen in decades. Grouped into such sections as Reconstruction, TechnoSustainable, Radical Lifestyle, Microcommunity, Utility, Mobile, Survival, Healing, Worship, Intervention, Fort, Clandestine, Misuse, and Adapt, it’s impossible to come away from this thinking the future’s barren. The stuff here’s going to rise in a multitude of ways, is great to muse upon, is sufficient to spark a thousand ships of new invention, and adds up to poetry, in the final run, of the highest order.
Taken with all the other works listed, it makes for a truly eclectic and exciting gift offering for all of us this season, as well as for all mankind, in each of their small, specialized ways.
