Category: Books to Read (Page 7 of 14)

I did a lot of summer reading this year. For years I’ve been working on two big New Mexico-themed projects so I’ve been reading essays, anthologies, tracking down art books. Here is a survey of what I’ve been reading so far.

Poems of the American West, Everyman’s Library Pocket Series, Edited by Robert Mezey, 2002

This book proves an editor really does set the tone and style of an anthology. Mezey has somewhat modern and abstract tastes, which I liked, but would have liked a wider survey of different styles. His "west" goes all the way to Canada and out to California.

Turquoise Land, Poetry anthology from the New Mexico State Poetry Society, 1974 and Sandscript, volume 2 of the NM State Poetry Society, 1976

Although there are plenty of what you might call amateurish pieces here, (or what I prefer to call workshop poems), I found some of the best ALBQ landscape poems in these books. Most ALBQ poems I’ve found so far have been very urban (to be expected), but I’m always been attracted to ones that deal with land forms around the city.

New Mexico Poetry Renaissance, Edited by Sharon Niederman and Miriam Sagan, 1994

This is my favorite anthology so far. This book provided me with my longest list of poets to investigate further and involves a good, short sampling of each poet with some biographical information.

The Turquoise Trail, Edited by Alice Corbin Henderson,  1928

This is the first anthology of gringo poetry in New Mexico. It primarily samples the Santa Fe and Taos poets of the 20s and 30s. I found a few poets to investigate later. What frustrated me most about this book was just trying to locate a copy; it proved how lacking historically significant books of New Mexico literature are from its public libraries. You might find some of these books in reference sections if at all. They’re not being reprinted and not being repurchased for the libraries although I found my copy for $6 on ebay.

I experienced the same issue with the Santa Fe novels Fire in the Night, 1934, by Raymond Otis and No Quarter Given by Paul Horgan, 1935. I had to find those two on Abe’s online bookstore for rare books.

The Selected Poems of John Gould Fletcher, 1988

One of the poets I pursued after reading The Turquoise Trail was John Gould Fletcher. I liked his poem “Rain in the Desert.” Fletcher made a few trips to Santa Fe in the 1930s and was on the periphery of editor Alice Corbin Henderson’s circle. This anthology has a sprinkling  of Arizona Poems  including “Cliff Dwelling,” “Rain in the Desert”, and other southwestern poems like  “The Last Frontier,” “Crucifixion of the Skyscraper” (which reflects the New Mexico circles dis-satisfaction with urban areas),  “On Mesa Verde ” and “The Burning Mountain” (I wonder if this is about the Sangre de Cristos). Fletcher was a southern Calvanist and the bulk of his work is gloomy and fate-obsessed and not about the southwest. 

In Company, An Anthology of New Mexico Poets After 1960, Edited by Lee Bartlett, V.B. Price, and Dianne Edenfield Edwards, 2004

This one was a total slog including copious amounts of modern and experimental poetry (which, in its defense, it admits to in its subtitle). Most poems were decidedly not about New Mexico or the idea of place (fair enough). But 520+ pages of this point of view was too much and mostly unremarkable stacked up against other, more famous, experimental work. I may have been less harsh after only 250+ pages.

I also came across a self-published book while visiting the ghost town of Chloride, New Mexico. This is one of the remaining ghost towns which actually courts tourists. It has a gift store, a museum and a café and the town is only one street long! The book I found was South to Southwest by Patsy Crow King. She says these are poems for her grand-kids and it looks like my copy was one of ten printed. All the pages are printed fully bolded and in a big font. Certain poems have words missing, capitals misused, errors in punctuation (although she lead her local creative writing group and won some of its prizes as president and contest chair). She also includes some of her husband’s poems in the book.  But that said, she's actually an interesting rhymer and there are three poems of historical interest, one on Chaco Canyon, one on Monument Valley, and one rare gem about the ghost town of White Oaks, New Mexico.

Other recommended NM Lit Books

Santa Fe & Taos, The Writer’s Era, 1916-1941, Marta Weigle and Kyle Fiore, 1994

This is an amazing book filled with historical yet gossipy details about 1920s/30s Anglo writers who settled in Santa Fe and Taos.

Spud Johnson & Laughing Horse by Sharyn R. Udall, 1994

After you read Santa Fe & Taos, The Writer’s Era, you’ll want to get a hold of this book. Again, missing from New Mexico libraries. I found it on Abe’s Books.

The Southwest in American Literature and Art, The Rise of the Desert Aesthetic by David W. Teague.

I bought this book in Paris of all places. It’s a bit dry but these are fascinating essays on the change in American aesthetic consciousness among Europeans, the very idea of the west and how artists and writers contributed to changing those ideas about what was beautiful and transcendent about a landscape.

The Desert is No Lady, Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art, Edited by Vera Norwood and Janice Monk

Textbook like in size and depth but, again, essays with amazing overviews of southwestern landscape writing from many more perspectives: Native American, Hispanic, Cowboy/the Anglo settler, and the modern artistic zones of New Mexico today.

Past books I’ve read:

The Modern West: American Landscapes, 2006

A coffee table book on modernism in western photographs and art. But the best overview of western landscape concepts.

Adobe Odes by Pat Mora, 2006

The Desert is No Lady lead me to Hispanic poet Pat Mora. These odes are full-bodied reflections of New Mexico.

Mud Woman, Poems from the Clay by Nora Naranjo-Morse, 1992

Meditative and lyrical poems about clay-building and the experience of commerce in Indian markets. The book includes fascinating photos of her pieces.

Sun and Saddle Leather, Charles Badger Clark, Jr., 1915

A tiny volume of cowboy poems in older forms.

Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp, collected by John A. Lomax, 1927

This was my grandmother’s book. Recently I found a list of old southwestern and Mexican ballads my grandfather loved when he was 19 back in the 1920s. I’m still looking for a recording of a song called “Friendless and Sad”…it wasn’t in here.

Red Earth, Poems of New Mexico, Alice Corbin Henderson, 1920

You can find cheap knock-offs on Amazon but stick it out for a nice hardback copy reprinted from The Museum of New Mexico. It includes artworks matched to the poems. Considering Henderson was the ringleader of the poets in The Turquoise Trail and that fact that Henderson was co-founder of Poetry Magazine with Harriet Monroe, I had high hopes for this book. I was disappointed, but there are a few evocative moments.

Fray Angelico Chavez, Selected Poems, 1969

Chavez is a poet from Wagon Mound originally, known to be a Catholic historical revisionist. I wanted to sense some kind of locality in this slim chapbook of poems but they were mostly kind of dry.

Place as Purpose, Poetry from the Western States, Edited by Martha Ronk and Paul Vangelisti, 2002

Los Angeles' Autry Museum published this book of poets who just happen to be from the western states, not necessarily poetry about the western states. And again, we’re talking about western states here as opposed to southwestern states. Lots of experimental pieces. Annoyingly, there’s no table of contents.

Along the Chisholm Trail and Other Poems, George Rhodes, 2012

Not specifically a New Mexico book but this one was a winner in the Independent Book Awards. It has a great cover and some poems I liked. Mostly contains cowboy forms.  Cowboy forms are good to read but get old after large quantities are consumed, much like experimental pieces.

Cactus and Pine, Songs of the Southwest, Sharlot M. Hall, 2006

Hall is an Arizona historical figure and this is a collection of her poems I picked up at her museum in Prescott, Arizona. She hated the idea that Arizona and New Mexico were once proposed to exist as one big state.

Cowboy Poetry Matters, From Abilene to the Mainstream, Contemporary Cowboy Writing, Edited by Robert McDowell, 2000

This is Story Line Press' gesture to bring back cowboy poetry (along with other forms). The movement gets a bit too political for me (see my essay about this topic, Writing in the Age of Narcissism), but this is actually a good anthology of poets writing in this genre sort of now.

Cowboy Love Poetry, Edited by Paddy Calistro, Jack Lamb and Jean Penn, 1994

Way over-designed but a good anthology.

Selected Poems of Jimmy Santiago Baca, 2009

Baca is a famous local poet with a personal story of triumph. The movie, A Place to Stand, based on his life does not yet have a distribution deal I’ve seen a version of it that was beautiful and captivating.

Face Painting in the Dark by Ann Cefola, Dos Madres Press, 2014

Full disclosure: Ann Cefola and I graduated from the same MFA class at Sarah Lawrence College. Looking back, I’m usually discouraged to find less and less of us are still working as writers.

W. H. Auden once made a prediction about successful writers: not one who has something burning to say, but one who is in love with with language. I find this to be a true measure of my MFA friends. Those who have continued to write are in love with words and sentences. Also, the successful writer is compelled to keep going, compelled to keep writing whenever they can. They don’t make excuses about having no time or inspiration. Their time is sacred to them and they defend it. Ann Cefola has kept going and she has been an inspiration to me. She’s kept working on her poems, on poetry newsletters and blogs. She’s published two chapbooks and now a first collection.  Over the 14 years I’ve known her, she’s kept on keepin on and she’s encouraged me to keep on, too.

My reading of her work has evolved over the last 14 years. Her poems are tight and her juxtapositions are advanced. Reading her now I see the art of containment and the order of her constructed phrases. Her poems sometimes feel like incantations in their brevities. The juxtapositions between poems are particularly good in the new collection so that even the older chapbook poems feel new.

I am beginning to see her phrases like very particular paint strokes, cerebral leaps. I have always loved that her poems express a kind of thinking in process.

There are many new, explosive poems in this book…the poem about Picasso's “Demoiselles” being one example, a conversation with the subject of the painting, the women. Full with very smart allusions and juxtapositions, Ann and the divas work through history's responses to the painting. I've recently read about two types of feminism:  that which deconstructs and that which reconfigures (or revamps) the situation of being a woman. I feel this poem does both, comparing the Demoiselles to WNBA players and ending with the incredible line,  “I am just a girl writing.” This poem blew my head off.

I found many exciting transgressive strokes all through the book. There are poems about identity and making ourselves up, poems about New York City, office spaces, a really unique 9/11 poem, a veritable stroke of a "before."

From "Shrapnel"

"A live hand across two world wars
astounded and mourning between lines
your point sharp, your No. 1 pencil so delicate,
so willing to be erased."

From "Express," a poem about taking the train into the city:

"Heavenly bodies, arching above
warm coffee, cinnamon and yeast below.
Stretching doughy muscles and sweet cells,
we like small loaves expand, turn golden, rise."

This time around, I notice Ann's 3-4 word phrases that are very tight and feel like assemblages that build to a mood. Ann also knows and uses the power of punctuation.

From "Forceps"

"Soul braces, Here we go. No cheers:
Cold city street. People rushing to trains,
What will happen to me? – I don’t know, sweet pea?"

Ann also captures the spirit in the suburbs. Fro the poem "Price Club"

“I want transubstantiation, to be taking up in cornflakes.”

She artfully weaves a phrase through the poem "North by Northwest" and "Anthem" is a lovely meditation on the afterlife of an ant. Time after time, Ann puts herself in wildlife poems.

I highly recommend this first collection by Ann Cefola.

Given Sugar, Given Salt by Jane Hirshfield, 2001

I found this book at my local library recently and thoroughly enjoyed her poems of noticing and mindfulness, which I realize is not for everyone. If you've ever engaged in any Buddhist practice, you might love these poems, too.

Hirshfield has a particular quietness like watching monks chop wood or chop carrots. They are full of small rituals, meditations on choice. She expresses a kind of spiritual movement and stasis.

In structure and tone, her poems remind me of other lyric poems of the 1990s. At one point her sister asks, “Does a poem enlarge the world, or only your idea of the world?”

My favorite poems here deal with existence and changes. Hirshfield's book contains an ant poem, too: “Like an Ant Carrying Her Bits of Leaf or Sand”

"The ant’s work belongs to the ant.
The poem carries love and terror, or it carries nothing.”

From "Red Berries"

"The woman of this morning’s mirror
was a stranger
to the woman of last night’s"

In "The Room" Hirshfield expresses a fear of new love with the act of preparing the house for a new guest to come and then the  “shivering hopes” that “follow it in.”

From "Apple"

"One takes a bit, then the other.
They do this until it is gone."

This is the work of a spiritual practice. In "Rebus," she talks about the red clay of grief and asks "How can I enter the question the clay (grief) has asked?”

For me, some of the poems in the middle are vague. There are many contemplations of objects: buttons, pillows, carpet, an onion, a rock, clocks, ink. She is exploring thusness.

Dreams and identity are also recurring themes.