Random Thoughts

I think I bought this because I read a poem by Notley in The Paris Review?

Huh, it’s not often you read a note at the start of a poetry collection giving a user’s manual… Do the poems really need that?

OH MY GOD

I guess they do, sort of, but once you get used to it, it reads much like most other poetry. That is, it seems like Notley uses “quotation marks”

the same way
other poets
use newlines.

(Although it’s difficult not to think of Zagat’s — ‘This “restaurant” has “good” food.’)

So it reads well, really, which perhaps explains why my Penguin edition here is the 19th printing? Or perhaps it just means that this book is assigned reading in All The Colleges.

Which would be understandable — it’s extremely American. That is, it’s all metaphor and spirituality, and … I hate that sort of thing.

I did read the entire book, but I should have ditched it after the amusing novelty wore off.

The Descent of Alette (1996) by Alice Notley (buy new, buy used, 4.31 on Goodreads)

I think I picked this up at a sale a couple years ago?

This is a very shiny book — not only the cover, but the interior pages as well.

It’s really good, of course. Jan Erik Vold is perhaps the most important Norwegian poet, and the illustrations from Kverneland work well.

Illustrating poetry isn’t easy — you can be too literal (and bore the reader by repeating what’s written) or you can be too abstract (and basically just be wallpaper for the text). Kverneland avoids both problems admirably.

Ikkje (1997) by Jan Erik Vold, Steffen Kverneland

I have no idea why I bought this book a couple years ago — I’ve read two books by Muriel Spark before, but they haven’t really inspired me to go all in… Perhaps I read a review of the book somewhere? Or something?

The physical copy here isn’t very inspiring. It feels more like a print on demand book than a print on demand book does. C’mon, New Directions.

This is written in a fascinating fashion — the language is breezy, amusing and digressive, but also oddly slippery. You never know what the next thing is going to be, and it’s frequently slightly unclear just what she’s talking about at the time, although it’s often clarified a few sentences on.

So it’s like a mind dump of the hostel/club she’s describing; all these young women living their intertwined lives, talking over year other.

And then out of the blue, there’s a shocking ending.

It’s a good book, but it was sometimes hard to keep paying attention, because it flows in such a strange way.

The Girls of Slender Means (1963) by Muriel Spark (buy new, buy used, 3.65 on Goodreads)