Category Archives: Reading

Reading

A lovely poem for a quiet evening

American Life in Poetry: Column 266
by Ted Kooser, US Poet Laureate
The great American poet William Carlos Williams taught us that if a poem can capture a moment in life, and bathe it in the light of the poet’s close attention, and make it feel fresh and new, that’s enough, that’s adequate, that’s good. Here is a poem like that by Rachel Contreni Flynn, who lives in Illinois.

The Yellow Bowl

If light pours like water
into the kitchen where I sway
with my tired children,

if the rug beneath us
is woven with tough flowers,
and the yellow bowl on the table

rests with the sweet heft
of fruit, the sun-warmed plums,
if my body curves over the babies,

and if I am singing,
then loneliness has lost its shape,
and this quiet is only quiet.

Poem ©2009 by Rachel Contreni Flynn, whose newest book, “Tongue,” is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.

Reading

“My guilt is all I have left.”

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"Ironweed"The ML100 continues to depress! William Kennedy’s “Ironweed” tells the story of Francis Phelan, a homeless man who has been almost entirely consumed by guilt. Ultimately, it’s a story about redemption, but the reader has to slog through quite a lot of sadness and destruction (and ghosts) to get to it. There wouldn’t really be a story at all without that slogging, though, so I suppose that was the whole point. I wasn’t deeply touched by the story, but it wasn’t bad.

I’m still trying to work out on what merits the Modern Library chose their Top 100. So far, it seems to be closed-off characters and a heavy dose of long, rambling internal monologues.

Reading

Kicking off a new project with a depressing book

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The Sheltering SkyI love to read, but I find myself more often than not reading a lot of twaddle. I’d like to stop that and read some substantial works for awhile. So I’m going to read my way through the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels. I’m not going to start with the first one, though, because it’s James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” And “Ulysses” intimidates me.

Instead, I started with Paul Bowles’ “The Sheltering Sky,”which I’d never heard of before I decided to start this project. It’s the story of two jaded Americans and their seemingly without-a-care pal traveling aimlessly around North Africa, and boy howdy, it is bleak. Bowles was born in New York but lived most of his life in Morocco, and he nailed the unhinged feeling of being a stranger in a strange land.

It took me quite a while to get into the story, and then suddenly I couldn’t put it down. I even took it to the dentist, where I read it in the waiting room while everyone else watched “One Life to Live.” It was a well-written and very effective story (“The Sheltering Sky.” Not “1L2L”.) Reading it, though, left me with the hope that the Modern Library didn’t make “disconcerting and depressing” essential qualities in their list.

And, in yet another reason to love the internet, here’s a bit of what Tennessee Williams said about the book:

In this external aspect the novel is, therefore, an account of startling adventure. In its interior aspect, “The Sheltering Sky” is an allegory of the spiritual adventure of the fully conscious person into modern experience. This is not an enticing way to describe it. It is a way that might suggest the very opposite kind of a novel from the one that Paul Bowles has written. Actually this superior motive does not intrude in explicit form upon the story, certainly not in any form that will need to distract you from the great pleasure of being told a first-rate story of adventure by a really first-rate writer.

I suspect that a good many people will read this book and be enthralled by it without once suspecting that it contains a mirror of what is most terrifying and cryptic within the Sahara of moral nihilism, into which the race of man now seems to be wandering blindly.

The full Williams piece contains a big ‘ol spoiler, so don’t read it if you don’t want to know. Here is a much more thorough assessment of “The Sheltering Sky” than mine, written by someone who’s also reading the Modern Library 100.