proximoception

41. Glass, Irony & God
42. Cold Calls
43. Pessoa & Co., tr. Richard Zenith

Two rereads, the other is more of Logue's Homer, Cold Calls, which I wasn't able to find in stores or libraries but noticed yesterday is on the Poetry magazine website in its entirety:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/31395

As are the probably two best sections of Anne Carson's Glass, Irony and God, "The Glass Essay" and "The Book of Isaiah":

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178364
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178363

"Glass Essay" was the first thing I read of hers, back in the library of Capilano College, now University, in North Vancouver. In 2004, it must have been, since I was only there in 2004. You'll have seen that library, they do a lot of filming there. Any library scene where you can see a circular bench set into the floor is probably there. Looking at my ledger thingie I notice I've read something by Carson every single year since then, and also by Roth, who I also got into in '04. Roth publishes every autumn like clockwork, and Carson's been almost as regular, so that probably accounts for it - but it's for a reason that they're members of a bare handful of writers I bother keeping up with. I associate them with one another, which in some respects I agree is loopy, but both got burned by some pretty unpleasant-sounding opposite sex numbers in ways that branded their work forever after. Both are also remarkably wry and amusing about these obsessions - making them pinch-hitters when it comes to love, or maybe more basically comedians whose subject is anguish...or better yet, and to their immense credit, writers doing what Shakespeare did. Roth's historical excursions are an admittedly vaguer parallel to Carson's more purely classics-themed writings, but these do provide similar traction/distraction.

Carson didn't suffer much on the reread, but Pessoa took still less of a hit. I started A Little Larger than the Entire Universe, Zenith's companion volume, but decided it had been so long since I'd read the other that I'd better go back to that too. So I read all of each heteronym in order across both volumes, saving Campos for last, of which there's 140 pp left to go through in Universe. He leaves out a few poems from Keeper of Sheep so I supplemented with Honig/Brown.

I think I'll post a few of my favorites soon. Pessoa can be pretty pedestrian, even drab, and he can also be soul-wringingly amazing. To my surprise I frequently put the book down and closed my eyes the way you do when, you know, it happens. More often than with Carson, even. Perhaps that says more about the refractory period needed to get the most out of great poems, I don't know. She's much more consistent, as technician, entertainer, even voice, but he attempted a direct centrality, for lack of a better term, that other 20th century poets have mostly avoided - even Ammons and Borges are more oblique. And when he succeeds at it, esp. as Campos and Caeiero, he succeeds in 19th century terms, and I mean that in a really, really good way, a Whitman and Dickinson way. Anyway, examples to follow.

The Logue/Homer is also great. And funny, this time.