Of Lamb, Cows, Ghazals, and Marianne: Summer Reading Miscellany

Recently acquired: a nice little stash of poetic fare, delightfully light but never cloying, anchored in the madhouse of love, bovine heft, ancient form, and good-byes.

Page from Of Lamb.

A collaboration between Matthea Harvey and Amy Jean Porter, I saw Harvey present this erasure poem with text culled from A Portrait of Charles Lamb (by Lord David Cecil) at the Art Institute as a part of the Poetry Foundation's Poetry Off the Shelf series. Harvey plays tenderly with the story of the lives of troubled literary sibs Charles and Mary Lamb, creators of the children's book Tales from Shakespeare. Porter colorifically illustrates. (As of this morning, Cecil's The Stricken Deer or The Life of Cowper is on my reading list—Cowper is a poet-to-whom-I-return, and what a title.)

The Cows

Lydia Davis's ruminations on the cows in the field across the road are the most relaxing morning's read in memory.

I workshopped with Ron Koertge in the early to mid-nineties. It was life-changing, finding his work, defined by fun and irreverence, and working with a skilled and bebooked poet and storyteller who'd left the cape of clicky self-importance at the side of the road in the mud where it belongs. Indigo, Koertge's uber-fresh cadre of 69 "bastard ghazals" read like minty spirited fizzy water on a hot summer's dusk.

Even cuter in the hand.

I love small books: pocket editions, micro fiction, the most petite chapbooks. I like the Everman's Library editions generally, big and pocket. I have most of Leonard Cohen's poetry in original editions and knew the poems before I first heard the songs. This duplicates a lot of what I already have, but I find it cool that RH is giving Cohen official canon status and it's really nice to read the great songs like poems:
Oh you are really such a pretty one
I see you've gone and changed your name again
And just when I climbed this whole moutainside
to wash my eyelids in the rain . . .