Ten Books That Have Stayed With Me

Well, since everyone else is doing it...

List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don't take more than a few minutes and don't think too hard-- they don't have to be "right" or "great", just ones that have touched you. (In no particular order...)

The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry in the Twentieth Century – Edited by Hayden Carruth. This book has literally “stayed with me” since I was 16 years old and stole it from my high school library*. It has been with me everywhere I’ve lived since leaving home more than 30 years ago, as well as on numerous trips. My introduction to poetry. And still possibly the best anthology of poetry ever produced. In terms of great work by many different great poets in such a portable size, I’ve never encountered another anthology like it.

The Bible – Despite a bad rep from being misused and abused by a lot of uptight people, it’s an amazing collection of wisdom, beauty, horror, sex, violence, poetry, literature, mystery and, frankly, a lot of freaky and dark, weird-ass shit. Existentialism didn't start with Kierkegaard, it started with Ecclesiastes. I read it every now and then to remind myself of what's really going on here.

Herzog / Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow. They both stay with me, as does most of Bellow’s work. His deep humanity and intelligence, and his mastery of writing... He’s meant a lot to me in my life.

The Sun Also Rises / For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway. Again, I don’t know how to separate them. I read TSAR first, while sunning on an incredible rock in Arches National Park and listening to Mozart. It probably started my interest in Spain. "Isn’t it pretty to think so?" On the other hand, the ending of FWTBT made me stand up out of my chair and feel the presence of God and/or Death or Love. That’s the way I want to go out. "There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true."

The Park of Upside-Down Chairs - Alexandra van de Kamp. I lived with this book before it even existed. I experienced its long and painful birthing process. And it’s all around me every day. Plus, heck, I took the author’s photo. The work inside still moves me and makes me love the person who wrote it. And she’s only gotten better. At poetry and everything else.

Cutting through Spiritual Materialism - Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I always think of Trungpa as the Brooklyn-Take-No-Shit Buddhist. This book should be read by anyone who thinks they’re on any kind of spiritual path (or not), because it will kick your ass and expose every trick and trap you invent for yourself to pretend you’re “spiritual.” Sandal slap in the face x 100.

A People’s History of the United States (Howard Zinn) / Memory of Fire Trilogy (Eduardo Galeano.) I also think of these together, as they opened my eyes to another aspect of my spiritual path. Gracias a mi padre Guillermo Glenn for laying them on me and changing my life.

Danny Dunn and the Voice from Space - Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams. This could be any of the Danny Dunn books I read as a young boy. I re-read most of them in the last year and still loved them. Such a wonderful series about a boy who wants to be a scientist and gets into lots of trouble. The marvel of the childhood imagination. May we never lose that.

Confieso que he vivido [Memoirs] - Pablo Neruda. The life I would like to have lived and never will.

Sixty Stories - Donald Barthelme. This one has been through several moves as well. So much creativity and imagination. So funny. So dark. So weirdly wonderful and poetic. Alexandra says she can always tell when I’m reading Barthelme because I laugh a certain way. She calls it, “The Barthelme laugh.” It’s genuine joy mixed with the pain and sadness of being alive.

* By the way, do not steal books from libraries. Libraries have terrible budgets and lose thousands of dollars worth of books every year. The books belong to the community. They're not to be hoarded by one person! People who steal books from libraries can wind up working in a library! Don't let it happen to you!

Dear Jean Seberg

Alexandra's new collection of poetry, Dear Jean Seberg, has now made its way into the world. Winner of the 2010 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest, as selected by Matthew Dickman, the book features a wonderful cover by the artist Robert Edwin. Inside and out, it's a beautiful work of art - and a steal at $6.

Here's what Alexandra has to say about the book on her blog:

This collection of poems really came out of sitting on the couch--I mean sitting on the couch watching films: black and white films, Technicolor at its most Technicolor, Steve McQueen car chases, French films (thanks to my librarian husband's knack for discovering obscure, and then not-so-obscure, directors and actors and then being very good at using the local library system to get access to sometimes hard-to-find DVD or video copies of these films). We found ourselves coming up with our own homespun versions of film cycles: William Holden Month, or Yves Montand Week, or, a Jean-Luc-Godard film cycle. Thus, I re-watched "Breathless" and discovered a new interest in the cherub-faced, blond American from Iowa, Jean Seberg, who found herself (via a rather circuitous route) in a Jean Luc Godard film in the 1960's.

Hence, the title poem of this collection. This chapbook is really a journey onto a fuller, longer collection, but I believe it stands on its own as a verbal stamp of some of the images, films, words and sounds that have influenced me over the last few years since moving out to the eastern end of Long Island. I don't consider Dear Jean Seberg to be about film; I consider it a collection of poems infused with the atmosphere of some films I watched and how images and moments in those films flickered in and out of my life long after watching them. . . .

Jean Seberg led an enigmatic, hard-to-categorize life, and my only hope is that these
poems begin to capture some of the wistful strangeness that was the backdrop to her life and the surreal collisions that can occur, at times, in anyone's life.

Here's a sample poem from the collection that was published last year on Verse Daily:

Dear B—

Dear Babaushka, dear
ba-ba-ba-boom, dear oh-my-God
don’t broil me alive. The world
is a percussive instrument
we strum until we die—hum, hum
go the car wheels over the drive;
pluck, pluck the rain sings
for the one-millionth,
bloody time. The feet
earn their calloused soles
and are the saintliest
body part of all—stomp,
stomping along. Dear
Bang on a Can, I like the way
you slap the sunken-eye
of the hollow drum. I like your
New York band’s underwater,
booming sound. I like the sea’s
surface as well—how it’s
hard or soft depending
on the distance from which
you choose to approach. Just try
jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge
towards that ruffling,
dark scarf of water
purring beneath. A kiss can be
the softest slap of all, but
I admire the snow, its soft-shoe
shuffle, its Fred-Astaire
panache, as it debonairly dresses
the trees in white, while slickening
the pavement towards
tuxedo black. Blah, blah, blah,
people do go on about whatever
it is they think they know. Bruno
was my mother’s maiden name—
a brood of Italians from Sicily
settling in a small, sea-side,
Rhode Island town,
near the prosperous,
budding, rubber factory.
That factory’s been converted
into high-brow, assisted living now—
with pale sconces in the hall
and a recreation
room—a place we almost,
but never did,
send my grandmother to.
Beached-whale, barracuda
sunrise: the world vacillates
between environmental
documentary and James Bond
thriller, but the clouds burst
and explode between genres;
some evenings, splitting the sky
into lavender, melon
and a wintry vanilla.

Online Poetry Reading

More shameless self-promotion. . . .

I'm featured this week at poetryvlog.com, an online journal with videos of poets reading their work.

I read three poems: two from my recent chapbook, A Brief Guide to American Poetry, and a short, newer piece. It's about six minutes in all. You'll need an updated version of QuickTime or Windows Media Player.

poetryvlog.com has a nice archive of all the poets who've been featured, including La Reina, Alexandra van de Kamp. Look for her work as well.

Peace!