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Feminist Non-Fiction Countdown

A Poem I Love — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 19:40:37 +0000

Ms. Magazine has been counting down the 100 best feminist non-fiction books. The complete compilation—based on reader nominations and voting—reveals a clear favorite: bell hooks has a total of seven books, including three in the top ten and the number one pick.

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Comics Journal Talks with Jesse Moynihan

A Poem I Love — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:05:51 +0000

“Of course that stuff isn’t strictly autobiographical. Some of it comes from daydreams, long showers, running, and the desire to write funny gags. A lot of times I will sit in a chair and stare at the wall. I let my mind go blank and whatever pops in first, I’ll try to explore and see if something comes of it. Usually I can get some nice nuggets that way; by just trusting my impulses or whatever it is.”

The Comics Journal interviews Jesse Moynihan. The article also includes interview extras, including a comic made in conjunction with Dash Shaw (originally posted in The Believer).

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Erin Fleming: The Last Book I Loved, Cassandra at the Wedding

A Poem I Love — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 22:40:52 +0000

I left Cassandra at the Wedding tearily hopeful and good and chastised.

I say left, but mean emerged from, because Cassandra is as much a spell or an ocean as it is a book, with an inexorable pull and terrible consequences. And while I’m comfortable calling a book an ocean–because of course you’ve all been swept out by wordy tides and tumbled bloody under crashing emotions that aren’t even your own–I’ll draw a quick backbone through Cassandra the book: It is a character study from the inside; it is a meditation on how precious and precarious our worthless lives are; it is a love story between Cassandra Edwards and her twin sister Judith, between Cassie and water, between Cassie and her mother and dying and writing.

Cassandra is narrated by Cassie, a Berkeley PhD candidate who travels home for Judith’s wedding; except when Cassie is unconscious after overdosing on sleeping pills and Judith takes over the story. The twin narrations show the sisters’ overlapping identities: they look the same and use the same vocabulary and each own half of the Bosendorfer piano that they bought together; only Cassie is wild and brilliant and foundering, and Judith, less completely precocious (Cassie notes that while she was first in their high school class, Judith was only fourth), seeks stability even as she understands and admires Cassie. Baker beautifully and heartwrenchingly contrasts the twins’ co-dependence when together, caught in Cassie’s powerful and largely drunken orbit, with their reality of inhabiting two discrete bodies with minds that are more and less than, but certainly not equal to, two halves that could fit together as a whole.

There are countless labyrinths, perhaps, that worthy books construct, but I never get good and trapped unless the maze is inside a person. I can escape clutching plot twists and cartwheeling word plays and switchbacking footnotes, and even the seduction of magical tremors with aplomb; but throw me inside an idiot like Cassie, or that dummy Horacio from Hopscotch, and I can’t separate myself because, god damn! the world is so minutely pleasing, and still its pain and uselessness and insanity stalks me. And when Cassie notes wryly that the last thing she remembers before passing out is speaking to a poster of a clown in her bedroom, “saying something quite brilliant, like ‘Goodbye, you clown’”–that’s deathly. Logic and humor carry her offstage, and I’m stuck inside her even as she’s gone.

Cassandra is also a tragicomedy, because it tries to end in a death and instead finds a marriage, and because Cassie emerges from her doomed love and doomed suicide attempt as lonely and self-centered and stupid about living as ever. She starts and ends contemplating the Golden Gate Bridge from her perch in Berkeley; and though she doesn’t feel like jumping the latter time, drunk people who live alone are prone to dying suddenly. But still–and again, Cassandra punches me hard and leaves me windless–Cassie is so simply joyful and in-the-world when we leave her, watching light playing as her sock falls into the San Francisco Bay less than twenty-four hours after a near-successful suicide attempt. She’s perfectly in love with the world despite only finding this justification to live rather than die: “One thing about being alive is that you can swim.”

Me too.

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Joey Nicoletti: A Poem I Love

A Poem I Love — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:05:17 +0000

I am smitten with Milton Kessler’s “Comma of God.” It’s a poem of great texture: a prayer, a chant, an adroit benediction. Perhaps most of all, it’s a testament to a fully lived life; an edifice of gratitude for having survived the business of going about one’s business with humility and strength. From the sheer joy of a Lester Young note to the furnace of Dresden, the images of Comma of God accrue with purpose, passion, & persuasion. Whoever reads this poem will be touched and moved by a potent presence that is intimate without being private, Walt Whitman proud.

Joey Nicoletti

Amy Letter: A Poem I Love

A Poem I Love — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 13:41:32 +0000

The last poem I loved is “Strongly Scented Sonnet” by Rhoda Janzen. It’s vivid and perverse, a bit disgusting, yet the most palpably romantic poem I have ever read. A woman, for her lover, tucks an apple into “the nest / of hair beneath her arm, a scent like cheese / extruding musky fragrances when pressed.” The language stabs: “the apple crabbed and freaked,” but the theme (and form) are utterly classic. Her lover “amorously kept it by his bed, / inhaling it—supurb!” The lusty physicality may not be pretty, it may not be love, but it makes me laugh and nod in recognition: there’s no accounting for lust, my friend, and nothing that so soundly slaps together the nasty with the desirable. Has a poem ever said it so well?

Amy Letter

Shara Lessley: A Poem I Love

A Poem I Love — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 05:00:21 +0000

Editors Note: In honor of National Poetry Month, The Rumpus has asked writers to provide us with poems they love, and the reasons why. We’re also including links to these poems in their entirety. We’ll be doing this all month.

Steve Scafidi: “For the Eighth Annual Celebration of St. Cecilia, the Patron Saint of Music, Purcellville, Virginia, November 1999″

I’m a sucker for syntax, and no one does the run-on quite like Steve Scafidi. In “For the Eighth Annual Celebration of St. Cecilia, the Patron Saint of Music, Purcellville, Virginia, November 1999,” form enacts meaning: in one sentence, each phrase rushes into the next joining sounds and stanzas to make a “music so great / no passage of time could ever kill it.” Like the best poems, “For the Eighth Annual Celebration…” dissolves boundaries of time and geography; it is both present – in and of its celebratory moment – and outside of real time, relying on quick temporal shifts to transport its reader from Purcellville to “ancient cities of / Cleveland or Sacramento,” as well as an imagined future in a Nigerian fishing boat. With its musical integrity and unabashed expression of joy, I can think of no better poem to open National Poetry Month than Scafidi’s energized and energizing ode.

The Rumpus.net » A Poem I Love

Feminist Non-Fiction Countdown

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Comics Journal Talks with Jesse Moynihan

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Erin Fleming: The Last Book I Loved, Cassandra at the Wedding

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Joey Nicoletti: A Poem I Love

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Amy Letter: A Poem I Love

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Shara Lessley: A Poem I Love

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