I’d love to read a book of poetry a week with some one, or some few people, who have capacity – please let me know. We might just start from our separate books at home and work to do a kind of poetry show and tell once a week based on the book that we read that week.

Noted books, references:

• Oliver de la Paz — Requiem for the Orchard
• Larry Levis – The Poet at Seventeen, Vortex & Swirl, Widening Spell of Leaves, The Dollmaker’s Ghost, The Boy in the Labryinth
• carl phillips “as from a quiver of arrows”
• Svetlana Boym – The future of nostalgia
• Louise Gluck, ‘we see the world once, in childhood / the rest is memory’ 

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I am taking a class with Rick Barot as offered by the Poetry Society of America. I love that it is mostly the reading of poetry books once a week and that it is not simply focused on writing at the same time. I had an opportunity to appreciate and sit with the book rather than splitting my focus between reading and writing. That said, I believe we are all learning a lot about the writing of poetry.

The class is focused on elegies, which are poems that are generally written about something or someone that has been lost. I found it curious that de la Paz wrote these poems just as I was coming out of college, twenty years ago. He was deeply engaged in the writing of poetry back then when I was still finding my footing.

Rick brought in a number of other references and names, including Svetlana Boym, Larry Levis, Alexander Petremov. Petremov was not necessarily related to the class but he is leading this class at Stanford’s continuing ed program and Rick recommended that. In the context of the book though, Rick brought in the work of Svetlana Boym because she offers the notion of reflective nostalgia and restorative nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia is a more conservative approach where  you are looking back to recreate the past as it was, whereas reflective nostalgia is more of lingering in the lyrical, reflective approach to looking at the past. 

Then we got into a bit of the organizing of the book, noting that it was very symmetrically organized. de la Paz seeks the past to think about his upbringing and his childhood. The book, as noted by Rick, is “luxuriously brocaded” in language. It might have been here that Rick shared that the poet Larry Levis was very likely a strong influence for de la Paz. He noted his most recent book Vortex & Swirl, and The Poet at Seventeen. 

de la Paz also reminded me yesterday to continue to read books by authors who may have some degree of similarity with my background or history, and to begin to place myself in conversation with them. The way de la Paz put it, it almost felt that he would read, make notes of what stood out to him in his ‘seed note book’ and then take up his sword, his pen when he wanted to join the arena, when he had something to say back. de la Paz also shared that reading has been a fount for him in his process. All poems, he shared, comes from looking at other poets, and deviating from there. He mentioned Levis here as Levis had a similar upbringing to him. 

When he began speaking of Levis’ meandering style where he is braiding in narratives, I thought of my late English teacher Audrey Sheats, and how she taught the triangle or three-part way of handling essays. I don’t quite remember how I started each of those locks, or narratives that wound up in my college essay but with her, in her red winter coat and mostly white hair, she’d read over it and see how the braid was coming along.

de la Paz goes on to speak about the idea that when he is structuring a poem, or book, that he wants in some way there to be a payoff at the end. The process of writing this book was really one of discovery and inquiry while braiding images, memories, and conversations from people. Braiding ideas together. His seed notebook includes lines he’s ‘stolen’ from other poets. It is from the wellspring of reading and notetaking that much of his work comes. He is thoroughly in response to other writers and staying in dialogue with other poets, and traditions. At the making of the poem, it is not quite collage but thinking about how other poems have solved other problems. 

de la Paz closed with a response prompted by my question: What of poetry now, in this time? And he reminded us all that it’s really about paying close attention, not just looking from “ten thousand feet, but from one foot.” In that, we too practice care. This had me thinking what might I want to pay closer attention to, what do I want to bring my eyes and noticing closer to observe. de la Paz closed, with the banning of art and books. Art, he says, is banned because emotions are elicited from art. ‘And that it is so dangerous to have a feeling populace connected to our feelings, our emotional intelligence.’

So that was all I was going to share today. I am so grateful to Rick Barot for the way he has shaped the class, and for the opportunity to hear from writers such as de la Paz and Victoria Chang. It has been truly inspiring and is bringing me to the page more consistently.

Wouldn’t it be great to be in reading partnership on poetry? Reading a book of poetry a week, and sharing things that stand out We can determine books that we would like to read, perhaps from what we already have and then read those together. Please let me know!