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MetaxuCafe UpdatesSearching Member Sites
I’ve recently added a search function so that you can limit your Google search to just the blogs that are members of MetaxuCafe. I think that will be a good resource for everyone looking for literary topics online and you’ll find it right on the front page as well as other places on the site. Now if you want to read about, say Orhan Pamuk, but only want to search the litblogs you trust, you can narrow your search right here.
Is There a Part of the Brain Reserved for Reading Poetry?
by Jacob Russell on May 09, 2008
Classes are over. Grades turned into. Only two weepy emails from students wondering what they had done wrong that I didn’t give them the ‘A’ they were sure they deserved. Do math professors hear complaints like this? “I know I couldn’t solve a single equation, but I worked so hard!”
Now to finish the novel I’ve been working since the end of the last century… and settle in for a summer of reading. I like to begin the day with poetry. Working my way through From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960 - 1990, George Oppen’s New Collected Poems, A Selection of the Poems of Laura Riding, and Frank Bidart’s Star Dust. For some time I’ve been taking notes on the Thomas H. Johnson collection of Emily Dickinson, every poem. I’ve not yet covered 300 and the poor paperback edition is falling apart, held together with duck tape and paper clips. I write the annotations in the margins so don’t want to buy a new copy.
In fiction: currently reading Douglas Parmée’s translation of A Sentimental Education. I should try it in French, but still working my way though Germinal--a page, a paragraph, a sentence at time. Before the summer’s over I hope I’ll be able to finish Musil’s Man Without Qualities.
Come the late afternoon, written out for the day, aching for human company, too early to make dinner, hours before I can justify calling it quits and heading for Bella Rosa for pool and a few glasses of wine, I take a chair and set it in the entrance walk in front of my apartment. (I rent a first floor front efficiency in a typical South Philly row house. Even have a little porch and a patch of garden space for basil, tomato, parsley, oregano and thyme). Broad street and a subway exit is only a block away, so there’s a steady parade of people coming home from work that time of day. I bring out my journal a book, couple of New Yorkers or the London Review of Books, a arrange a pillow at my back, settle down to bask in the late afternoon sunlight and read. The passersby satisfy the need for company, I get in quality reading time--altogether a fine way to end the daylight hours.
Cold wind and rain today, but there’s a nice café on Passyunk (several, actually… and not one Starbucks. I can take my pick)… pack up and do my reading with an espresso and almond biscotti.
Yesterday I was browsing through the London Review of Books (T.J. Clark has a wonderful piece on Courbet and Poussin at the Met--and a James Wood review), when I found myself staring at--not reading, but staring at a poem. I couldn’t read it. Couldn’t force myself to read it. I can’t read the New Yorker poems either. Sometimes it’s because they show up half way through an article or story I’ve already begun, and I don’t want to stop. But staring at this poem in LRB (two poems, actually--and both quite short)--I realized it was something else. I simply can’t read poetry when I’m already engaged in reading prose. I try… read a line or two. Nothing registers. It’s almost painful. I feel the muscles in my stomach contracting. I feel bad for the poets, their work surrounded by hostile prose, like trying to read them with three TV’s going.
I need silence. Borders. Lot’s of white space. Best of all--to come to them fresh from a night’s sleep full of dreams, cup of coffee in hand, desk cleared of clutter--especially--other reading matter. An open notebook--blank page inviting my impressions.
I’m sure that if my head were encased in an MRI when reading first poetry, than prose, entirely different areas of the brain would light up. For those who say they cannot read poetry… would it help to do a session of Tai Chi first? ... or yoga? Poetry requires a state of heightened mindfulness, a mind so acutely awake the circle comes back around and overlaps our dreams. But then, isn’t that true in general of how we experience art? Everything else is divided between waking and sleep, but engaging a work of art we live in a state that is neither and both--a third state of mind, a state of mind, like the kingdom of heaven of Jesus of the gospels--with many mansions. Some for poetry, some for fiction, some for dance. Shakespeare has one all to himself. And Bach. Homer. Cervantes. Lady Murasaki.
I would be happy be occupy a rusty watering can in the far corner of an old weather beaten garden shed at edge of the estate of the least of these houses of the mind.
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