Category Archives: Reading

National Blog Posting Month, Reading

I wrote a poem, took a big gulp of courage and hit publish

5 Comments

BlogHer is having a poetry contest, and so at quiet time today I wrote a sestina. Beyond being a lovely word on its own, a sestina is a kind of strict but also not terribly structured form of poetry.

The sestina follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi. The lines may be of any length, though in its initial incarnation, the sestina followed a syllabic restriction. The form is as follows, where each numeral indicates the stanza position and the letters represent end-words:

1. ABCDEF
2. FAEBDC
3. CFDABE
4. ECBFAD
5. DEACFB
6. BDFECA
7. (envoi) ECA or ACE

(Poets.org)

I have a hard time keeping the end words straight through all six stanzas (and the envoi!), so I used this handy-dandy Sestina-O-Matic template generator to help me. You give it your six words, and it churns out something that looks a lot like this, except with your own words and more lines:

# Use the template below to create a sestina.
# Your job: replace the ‘…’ with poetic greatness!
# Each line should end with the word shown below. …

# Stanza 1
… popsicle
… turkey
… peppermint
… abrigado
… munificence
… elk

# Stanza 2
… elk
… popsicle
… munificence
… turkey
… abrigado
… peppermint

and so on, etc.

Anyway, I sat on the couch and wrote this. It is, of course, mostly about the cats and also my socks. I haven’t written a poem in a lot of years. Be gentle.

Yesterday and Today and Tomorrow

Every soft surface trumpets it: “Here be cats.”
White fur everywhere bringing to bear
my best efforts to eliminate that ruff silhouette.
They’re alert at the window for every fly-by bird,
and in the floor my bunched-up socks
transmorgify now to toys. Like ducks to water.

Every morning I fill two little dishes with water.
Who was it that said that about the fog and the cats’
feet never met my cats. Those little fur socks
are stiff and strong and hard to bear,
digging and kneading bones hollow as birds’,
soft swift paws sharp as a silhouette.

On the mantel: A pair of silhouettes;
Five vases and not a drop of water;
one white ceramic discount bird;
knick-knacks that could pass for cats’
toys; and a single forge-fired black bear.
It’s maybe the only place I don’t leave my socks.

That habit of leaving my socks
everywhere bothers him. His silhouette
steels but I know he’ll silently bear
witness to my carelessness. And he’ll water
the plants and me and the kids and the cats
and never complain. He always has been a good bird.

The front yard will be covered with birds.
I tried to save his hat and now my socks
are sodden. The kids and the cats
are in the basement, their silhouettes
dark against the fluorescents. I’m water-
logged again and it’s almost, almost more than I can bear.

Last fall there was a small black bear
wandering our neighborhood. He was burred,
I’d imagine, half-starved and looking for water.
My feet can hardly stand the stricture, those socks,
and day by day my sofa-softened silhouette
repulses some but seems to entice the cats.

It’s genetic, I think, this preference for bare feet over socks.
A bird floats on the wind, paints across the grass his silhouette
and no longer yowling for water they become truly feral cats.

Reading

I’m a sucker for a good baseball story

“Hm,” the librarian said as she pulled the book off the holds shelf. “I’ll be interested to hear what you think of this one.”

“Have you read it?”

“No, but people have either really liked it or really hated it.”

And so I started Chad Harbach’s “The Art of Fielding” with trepidation. It’s a baseball story, but it’s also a friendship story and kind of a coming-of-age story and a love story or two. I’ve read a few reviews that liken it to some of David Foster Wallace’s writing, which made me feel rather nice because I had the same thought when I was reading it. I’m not a literary critic, though, so I can’t put a finger on precisely what it is. It’s in the somewhat ridiculous names — Henry Skrimshander, Guert Affenlight — and in the importance of books that only exist in the novel’s world, I think, as well as those other things that I haven’t been able to quantify.

We all know how I feel about Wallace — and if you don’t: I love him so much that I can’t bear to read his final, posthumous novel. I sat with it open to the first page and cried. I’m maudlin and I know it. — so the fact that “The Art of Fielding” reminded me of his work is High Praise. The book is gently written without being dumbed-down, and I found the characters believable and for the most part likable.

I am firmly in the Really Liked It camp.

Reading

I enjoyed this book, as evidenced by all the exclamation points herein

2 Comments

Firstly, Ransom Riggs is pretty much the coolest name ever.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about his book. OK, so he’s written several, but I’ve only read one. And that one is “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.” If the name alone weren’t enough to make me pick up the book, just look at that cover. It’s a creepy little girl, and she’s levitating. Mission accomplished, book cover designer person, I am in.

This is the story of a 16-year-old boy with a grandpa who thinks monsters are trying to kill him. But he’s just a crazy old grandpa who’s losing his mind. Or is he? Spoilers! Grandpa’s not crazy! There totally are monsters, as our plucky teenage protagonist soon learns! Except he’s not plucky so much as kind of in those teenage doldrums. But then he goes to Wales! And much confusing mayhem ensues!

If you read this story — and if you enjoy things such as adventure, monsters, mayhem and peculiar children, you certainly should read this story — you will ask yourself a question at the end. That question will be: Will There Be a Sequel? Allow me to save you the Googling time. “Yes, There Will Be a Sequel.” I’m glad to know that, because this book was a blast to read.