Valerie Loveland

I thought this book was pretty good, but there are other books that are similar to this that present the information in a way that is more appealing to me.

I never read Kenneth Patchen until American Poetry Review featured his poetry in their magazine. They included a lot of poems (maybe 20?) and I loved the poems. The voice seemed casual and simple, but they moved me. I can't believe I haven't really heard that much about him before them. The poems were a joy to read and Patchen might be my new favorite poet!

I went to the library and took out all the books they had written by Patchen. I went to another library and took out some more. I've liked just about everything I've read by him so far. There are a few poems here and there that are more formal, and I don't like them as much.

I've been to a couple used bookstores since discovering Patchen, and haven't been able to find any copies. Is this because everyone is holding onto their copies? All the library copies of his book seem very old. I don't know if this is because there aren't new copies printed.

The only complaint I have is about his titles. I love the titles, but I wish they weren't often the same as the first lines.

I noticed every single book I read by Patchen was dedicated to his wife, Miriam. I think that's great. I imagined every poem in the book of love poems was about their life together, which I also think is great.

My favorites in the book:

The Smithsonian has recordings of Patchen reading these poems and more.

23rd Street Runs into Heaven

As we are so wonderfully done with each other

The sea is awash with roses

There are not many kingdoms left

I borrowed this book from the library because I was waiting for a different book on the similar topic. I really enjoyed the book, and I'm really glad I decided to take this out.

The author described the issues of being always connected, and also gives suggestions on how to deal with them, acknowledging the fact that we can't stay away from the internet completely.

I have been trying to come up with a way to live with being online without feeling so rushed and increase my concentration. I've been feeling distracted lately. Before reading the book, I wasn't able to really figure out what exactly my problem was with being connected. Since I now realize the issue, I can now do something about it.

I finished this book, and now the one I originally wanted to take out (Nicholas Carr's The Shallows) is available. Perfect timing!

It is nice to read a translation of a woman poet who is the same age as me for a book written recently. Most translations I've been reading lately are of men a lot older than I am, and very often the poems were written a long time ago.

I never heard of Barskova before, she was publishing poems since she was 9 years old and came to the US when she was 20 to get her PhD.

I liked reading the book, but I wanted more. The book was very short. It has the poems in Russian and English on facing pages.

I had to read each poem multiple times before the meaning was clear. It was an enjoyable read. She mentioned Russian buildings, writers (mostly Russian, but Kafka too). I was grateful for the notes section, because I didn't know most of the names she mentioned.

The poems were all translated by Ilya Kaminsky, and usually another person or two. I liked the poems translated by Ilya Kaminsky and Matthew Zapruder the best. They just seemed a little more lively to me.

I would like to read more by this writer.

My favorites in the book:

Conjunctions And At the bottom of the page

When Someone Dies

From Mad Vatslav's Diary middle of page

During the Fire of Moscow middle of page

I started this book about 10 years ago and stopped reading it when I was about half through the book. I don't remember what made me stop reading. It's been nagging me that I haven't finished, especially this book is on every list of books that a person should read. I am always reminded that I didn't finish.

The book was even better than I remembered. I made a joke that I wish I waited until the economy was better before I read this book, but I think the economy made this book even more urgent to me.

I keep thinking about the characters in this book. I worry about them. The place the book ends is very effective, because I will be worrying about them forever. They will never be okay.

This is the first book I read by Kim Addonizio. I read a lot of her poems in literary magazines, and heard recordings of her reading

I can't figure out how she is so good. If I were to describe her writing style or the amount of list poems she makes, I would not be impressed. Her writing is fantastic. I love her list poems. Ideas that I would normally think are cheesy work great when she writes about them. She is a poetry mystery.

She is also very accessible. The next time someone asks what poetry I recommend, I am going to suggest Addonizio.

Her titles are terrible. She has a poem called “You,” “For You,” and “You Were.”

I don't know what makes Kim Addonizio so special that she can get away with writing this way, but I love it. She's great.

My favorites in this book:
Book Burning

You

Forms of Love

Dream Pig

I always felt like I was missing something when I read Szymborska. Recently, I was at a salon with a Polish poet, and she read Szymborska out loud for the group in the original Polish. The words were so musical in the original! The poet told us that she loved the translations done by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak because even though they couldn't recreate the music of the poems, they could capture exactly what Szymborska was trying to say. I made sure to get one of the collections translated by them when I was last at the library.

I wish I could have someone read me each of the poems in Polish (maybe I can find this online). I feel like the language is a little deflated, and it seems like everyone is “careful” to be exact when explaining the poems. I almost feel like the poem is being explained to me instead of me reading them.

That said, I still think the poems are good. The title poem and her poem about September 11 made me tear up, and I enjoyed reading through a lot of the poems. The last poem in the book is about the alphabet, and I was disappointed that Szymborska only explored the letters up to K and then said “and the rest of the alphabet.”

Someone once compared my line breaks (which she didn't like) to Szymborska (who she also didn't like). Her line breaks are not even.

My favorites:

Monologue of a Dog Ensnared in History

Photograph from September 11

Clouds

The Three Oddest Words

Gotfried Benn's poetry is mean spirited, but I still like him. I first read his poems in Poetry Magazine's translation issue a few years ago. Benn's poetry stuck in my mind more than any of the others in that issue. When I decided to read more poetry in translation, Benn was the first one I wanted to read. I had trouble finding his poems, and could only find this book, which includes prose. I didn't read the prose in the book.

I think the reason I like Benn's poems, even though I hate meanness and cruelty in poems is they are so well-written and witty. He is also not hugely mean-spirited. I was hoping to come to more of a conclusion on this by reading the poems, but I am still not sure why I like him.

I had never heard of Chairil Anwar until I looked at this book on the library bookshelf.

He was part of the “1945 Generation” and his (and the group's) poetry was instrumental in changing Indonesia's poetry to a more “individualistic style.”

The poetry was personal, and often described encounters with specific women. His poems were passionate.

There is controversy about him being a plagiarizer. He stole someone's poem because he was desperate for money because he needed a vaccination. His friends said he was constantly sick and he died in his 20's, due to an unknown disease.

I am obsessed with Jeopardy! so I got all the books about it in the library. At first I thought Harris's jokes were kind of cheesy, but his style really grew on me and I liked this book a lot. I don't know why it took me so long to read. I do agree that the most interesting parts are about the Jeopardy process, but I liked it overall.

I haven't read Milosz before but I know everyone is always talking about how good he is. I was looking forward to seeing this for myself.

I thought he was good too. All of his poems, no matter what they are about, make me feel like I am looking at “the big picture,” the meaning of life. I understand why people like him so much. I feel like his poetry is what people want from poems.

His line breaks in the beginning of the book happened at the ends of sentences, or at a natural break in the sentence. I liked his shorter poems best. The longer ones, at times felt scattered, or untidy. I usually like poems that are rough or messy, but it didn't feel right coming from Milosz.

There were times I wish he would just write about something typical, and boring and not have the subject really be as large as life, itself.

My favorite poems in the book

Window

A Study of Loneliness

Encounter

These poems were great. I checked out this book on a whim when I was at the library. I hadn't heard of Lalic, and opened his book and read one of the poems. The poem was great so I brought the book home.

The book is translated by Charles Simic. The poems are surreal, and they have some slight similarities to Simic's poems (although I'm sure this always happens with translators).

My favorite section of the book is Sonnets for Melisa (Lucky Melisa!) There are unique images, like comparing her body to a swarm of bees.

The poems have a lot of mirror imagery, along with stars, bees, gold and other metals. The images never feel overused. The titles are very often just one word.

I can't wait to read more by this great writer, but I think there are only 2 other books translated.

Here are the Melisa Sonnets on Google Books:

This book was all poems that were questions. I thought a lot of them were beautiful, and the structure of the book made it seem like you could read the book all the way through, or flip around and get the same experience. The questions on each poem were sometimes related to each other, and sometimes not. I thought it was fun to read a book that had a different format.

This book was written after Neruda knew that he had cancer and was going to die. It is a sort of goodbye to everyone and everything. The book was sad and touching, and felt like he was saying goodbye to his readers too. I wish I read this after I read all his other books. The book ends with “Gracias.”

This book was about Easter Island, which is a Chilean territory (I didn't know this before reading the book). The poems are either titled “Island” or “Men.” I liked the book, but not as much as other Neruda books I've read before.

I just started reading Crow, and really liked it, so when I saw The Hawk in the Rain at the library I picked it up. I started reading The Hawk in the Rain because that was Hughes' first book.

Some of the poems are really good, but overall, the book feels stuffy and uptight. I get glimpses of the direction Hughes will go in the future, but I definitely feel like this is a couple steps backward from Crow, which I am looking forward to getting back to. I'm glad I know I will like Hughes' later books because I don't know if I would give his poetry a chance if I read The Hawk in the Rain first.

I kept feeling like I wanted to rush to get through some of the poems.

The poems are very orderly, with stanzas and line breaks all done the same way. The titles were just mentioning the subjects only.

The poems I liked best in the book:

The Thought Fox

Six Young Men (At the bottom of the person's post.)

The Hawk in the Rain (bottom of post)

I read some of Tranströmer in a Swedish poet anthology, and didn't really care for his poems. I thought this book was gorgeous. This is a great example of how a bad translation can remove the life out of poems. I read about Robin Robertson's translation, and there are some stories that say Robertson distorts the original poems by adding in too much. I am going to try to find out more about this, because I enjoyed her translations in this book much more than the last translations I read.

This book was so short, there were only 37 pages, and half of those pages were in Swedish. Most of the poems were short. I read this very quickly.

I shouldn't have been so shocked at how great the poems were–lots of people like Tranströmer, and now I do too. I'm so glad I found this book, I was going to give up on him. The poems are so sharp and unique.

The poems were orderly with their line and stanza breaks. The titles were pretty boring–either one word or a simple phrase.

Solitude I

Black Postcards (after the soup photo)

Sketch in October

Calling Home

I am not used to reading translated poems that seem this fleshed out. Usually there is a skeleton-like quality to the poems and I can tell they were translated, but this book, I would have never suspected.

Bei Dao writes in Chinese and this book of poems is translated by Bonnie S. McDougall.

I loved the poems but I can't exactly say why. It isn't the type of writing I usually love, it's quiet, it doesn't really seem modern. The language is simple, but there is a light, enjoyable, very endearing quirkiness to the writing.

Most of the poems didn't have punctuation, and it didn't matter at all. Every poem was easy to follow. Most of the line breaks were broken in a way to help the reader navigate. The titles were pretty simple.

The big question is, will I still love Bei Dao when he is translated by someone else? I will find out soon, because I checked out every Bei Dao book I found at the 3 libraries I went to the last week. (Lately I have a ridiculous library compulsion, and right now I have 35 library books checked out from 4 libraries.) McDougall translated one other of Dao's poetry books.

My favorites in the book (I found some versions of these poems that weren't translated by McDougall but I'm not posting them because they aren't as good.)

I couldn't find any poems in the book online that were translated by McDougall, but I want to include a poem, so I am just going to type it out.

Song of Migrating Birds.

We are a flock of migrating birds
Who have flown into winter's cage;
In the green early dawn we set off
On our flight to the ends of the earth.

Let our shed feathers
Fall on the heads of young women;
Let our strong wings
Bear the sun aloft.

We herd dark clouds,
Swaying manes pass through rainbows;
We herd the winds,
Flying pockets are filled with songs.

It is our cries
That frighten icebergs into ancient tears;
It is our jeers
That shame roses into crimson cheeks.

North, our homeland,
Accept our dream: let a tree
Grow from each crack in the ice
To bear great and small bells of joy.

I haven't read Cavafy before, and I wish I had earlier! His poetry is wonderful.

I read about Cavafy in Wikipedia, and it said he had 3 types of poems: historical, sensual and philosophical. I didn't see any philosophical in this book, but he did have sensual and historical. The historical poems were good, but the sensual poems were fantastic. I can't wait to read more of them. The poetry seems very modern, even though the poet lived 1870-1933.

The titles weren't great, just single words or a phrase, always just the subject of the poem.

This book was really short, it included facing pages of English translation next to the original Greek, and it was only 55 pages. I am going to research and find some more of his books to read (suggestions welcome!).

My favorites in the book:

The Bandaged Shoulder

On the Stairs

The Photograph

Half an Hour

I know this was a series of letters but I think it should count as poetry. The writing is gorgeous and the way they typed up the letters line by line made it look like a poem on the page.

The only problem I had with the book was the way the lines were typed up. They wrote out all the words, whether they were crossed out and replaced with other words. I understand why they did this but because I am not used to the notation, I felt like I had to decode what I was reading. Her handwriting was terrible, so I couldn't just read the letters.

I thought this book was about the same as Berrigan's Red Wagon. This book included some poems that Berrigan collaborated with other poets, but they still all sounded like Berrigan poems to me. I would have never guessed that they were collaborations.

I preferred the poems with the line breaks that didn't put the words across the whole page. There were a couple experimental poems, list poems, poems with a single word per line. I thought some of them were successful (some of the lists), and some weren't (I didn't like the single word per line poems). I liked the prose poems and the sonnets the best.

Berrigan's 2 books that I read have the same energy. His poems seem very recognizable to me.

My favorites in the book:

Poem for Philip Whalen (I kept thinking I found this online, but it turns out A LOT of people wrote poems for Philip Whalen)

Rusty Nails (Have to arrow down a little)

Corridors of Blood

In Bed

People Who Died I don't have text for this but the poem is great, so I wanted to include it

Why do I keep reading books about Robert Lowell's jerky family?

It was interesting to learn about the Cuban Missile Crisis from someone that was there.

I finally got around to reading Neruda. I hear people read him now and then at open mics, and I always like them, but I never read one of his books.

Neruda is known for his love poems, so I thought this book would be a good place to start. These are the romantic poems that people think of when they want the person they love to write them a poem. They are passionate and sensual. The next time someone asks me for a love poem suggestion (this happens sometimes), I am going to send them to Neruda.

Neruda's titles are always the first phrase of the poem (I noticed this is not the case in other translations). The line and stanza breaks are not even or uniform. I think this suits the poems.

When I went to look for the poems online, I kept finding other translations. I am trying to post only Merwin translations of the poems.
My favorites in the book:

Every Day You Play

So That You Will Hear Me

Almost Out of the Sky

We Have Lost Even

After seeing a lot of people talk about Ted Berrigan, I got all the Ted Berrigan books from the library (as is my way).

Red Wagon is the first one I read, and I am going to start with the cover. It is hilarious, and exactly what you want from this kind of book. The cover has a map of the US with two hearts, one pink, one white, on it which are pierced by a sword (I think). Above the US is an envelope with a red heart peeking above the envelope.

I liked some of the poems inside more than others. I thought the sonnets were the best. There were some about Alice Notley (I assume) that I thought were especially beautiful. Some of the poems seemed too casual. All of them had a charm to them, and I know why people are fans. I still have two other books to read, and I'm looking forward to reading them I am going to get the sonnets, because those I liked best.

He wrote about Southampton so much, and I didn't know where it was, so I looked it up.

The line and stanza breaks were all over the place, some were all one stanza, some were spread out all over the page.

I liked the less casual poems, and the shorter poems best. They seem more “on task” and condensed.

My favorites from the book:

She (Not to be Confused with She, a Girl)

Sonnet 34

Sonnet 56

Sonnet 76