There is another thing that kind of made me laugh at myself: I continued to pay attention because Richard Blanco is a fine, fine-looking man. Dem arms. Seriously.

Look, perhaps we should have more open lusting for poets, yeah? If that is someone’s gateway into a poet’s work, then so be it. We all need more poetry in our lives.

All right, now that I’ve got all that off my chest, can I also tell you that I really enjoy Looking for The Gulf Motel? Yes, I do. Truly. It hits all my thematic hot spots — love, lust, and loneliness. Blanco revels in memory and intimacy, and much like Tracy K. Smith’s poetry, his work makes me want to bed down and stay.

Because my parents come from Florida — Miami, more specifically — and because I still visit my maternal grandmother in Port St. Lucie (which is more on the central coast), I feel at home reading about Florida. I’ve never lived there, but I imagine the familiarity I have is similar to what Blanco feels about Cuba, minus the political upheaval.

We click beers — Viva Cuba — though
I want to believe I’d hate my life here

from “Poem Between Havana and Varadero”

And I think I’d hate to live in central Florida, though I could grow to love Miami. My mom still likes to tell the story of taking me to a Cuban restaurant, and how the waitstaff was so amused by this baby with a giant, blond-fuzzed head, who would shovel in all the black beans she could get her hands on. Even though I barely remember my last trip to Miami at nine years old, I don’t think I’d feel like a tourist. (For one thing, I’d be busy eating all the properly cooked platanos in sight and would therefore be unconcerned with other matters.)

Everything I am is here still, sitting
with my grandfather on lawn chairs
watching plum sunsets and the clouds
of his tabaco vanishing into the wind,
into the chirp of crickets echoing back
from stars that haven’t moved since
I first saw them, and the moon not yet
replaced by the glow of the city’s lights

from “Sitting on My Mother’s Porch in Westchester, Florida”

Motel is not all about Cuba and Florida, but about identity, and about feeling comfortable with our desires. Whether we know we will be at home farther north, or that we do not fit the tidy traditional narrative our families imagined, Blanco has the words. I loved his poems about his romantic relationships, and “we were no good at that kind of talk, / remember? We had no language for / those mysteries: two men consumed / with one another.” (“Cheers to Hyakutake”)

There’s also an underlying anxiety with the desire to sometimes be someone else — to be the specific someone another needs. Is he supposed to be his father? Is there another him somewhere out there in another parallel universe? And the biggest question of all: “Why have you been sad all your life?” (“Birthday Portrait”)

To be honest, I don’t know what I love most about Looking for The Gulf Motel because it’s just all so true. What I don’t understand about people who get so turned off by the concept of the Other, as though their poor little brains cannot possibly process anything deviating from what’s in front of their noses, is that we’re really not so different. We all want to be loved, desired, and not so sad. We have complicated relationships, romantic and familial, and it’s not so scary to say so. Richard Blanco is a treasure, his words a salve, and he fills me with the best sort of yearning. Most of all, he makes me want to get to work.

Related Posts:

• Looking For the Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
• David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: A Poet and a President
• David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Viva Richard Blanco!
• The Last Book I Loved: “Please” by Jericho Brown
• The Last Book of Poetry I Loved: Revolver by Robyn Schiff

We’d like to know the last book you loved and why. Send us a writeup of the last book you truly loved — a little bit book review and a lot about why you loved it — along with a short bio. We’ll publish our favorites in The Rumpus blog. No length requirements, but please refrain from reviewing books written by people you know.

Please send The Last Book I Loved submissions to LBIL AT therumpus.net

Related Posts:

• The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
• The Last Book I Loved: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
• The Last Book I Loved: History of the Peloponnesian War
• The Last Book I Loved: Cataclysm Baby
• The Last Book I Loved: Brown Girl, Brownstones

Joan Didion must have felt the same way when she chose the poem as an epigraph for her essay collection of the same name. It was Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, not Yeats’s poem, that has been my totem throughout my twenties, because she has that gift that all great writers do of hitting on universal truths by admitting very personal ones. “One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before,” she writes in “Goodbye to All That,” an essay about her time in New York in her twenties.

Reading that sentence for the first time at twenty-one and knowing, at some level, that she was right was not nearly as comforting as realizing that there was an antidote to feeling young and confused—and that antidote was narrative. As Didion writes in another equally brilliant collection, The White Album, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” The trick to getting through your twenties intact, it seemed to me, was looking ahead to the narrative I could impose on that decade later in life.

I don’t recall why I first picked it up, but I can still conjure up the musty smell of the paperback I borrowed from the University College London library and the jarring contrast of being engrossed in Didion’s 1950s New York during a train ride between London and Manchester.

Mostly, I remember how homesick I felt reading Didion’s take on the American dream at a time in my life when, living far away from home for the first time, I was finally figuring out my own national identity. The irony of this feeling is that Slouching Towards Bethlehem isn’t what you would call a “feel-good” read. Most of the essays are set in California in the ’60s, some of them are reportage on Haight-Ashbury hippies and Howard Hughes, and others, personal reflections on Didion’s life in exile from a California that “resembles Eden,” where “it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished.”

Throughout the book, Didion is constantly shuttling between the coasts, back and forth from this promised land. In “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” in which Didion reports on a woman who murders her husband, she writes, “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.” California stands in for the American dream: its streets are always paved with gold, but its promise is never attainable. Didion’s writing—and her whole concept of California—nonetheless operates on the premise that all things are possible, because they have to be:

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.

But Didion’s California (and New York, for that matter) is a promise that never delivers, which she nonetheless can’t seem to give up. She admits, “Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.” I understood that differently upon first reading it in England—during a semester abroad in which all time was suspended for me and all post-graduate futures infinitely possible—than I do during my fourth year of racking up frequent flier miles on the US Airways shuttle between DC and Boston.

It’s a romantic point of view to hold when you come from a place that makes you feel exiled for living outside it, and in that sense my hometown of Boston and Didion’s Sacramento have much in common.

Mostly, I keep reading and rereading these essays because Joan Didion is a writer’s writer. In the spirit of her declaration in “Goodbye to All That,” I have to imagine that there are many other twenty-something writers out there with dog-eared copies of this book, but since I haven’t met them yet, I continued to think I was the only one for years after I discovered her. More recently, I have taken to recommending her to anyone whose literary taste I’m trying to judge. I lent a friend my copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem once with the earnest warning, “If you don’t read this, we can’t be friends,” and during the months while I waited for him to return it, I sometimes worried that I would have to cut him off.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem isn’t just a collection for hopeful writers or even for people who are young and unmoored. It’s for all people who have lost their sense of place or sense of time or sense of self. It’s for “the quiet ones” that people always tell you to beware. Didion is all of these things, but especially the last:

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

It’s easy to forget that line in the preface once the essays about Charles Manson and John Wayne give way to more personal ones about Didion’s relationship with her hometown and her grapples with self-esteem. It’s easy to think instead that the stories she tells of her struggles with depression are unvarnished, but at some point you have to ask: Why is this self-proclaimed shy, aloof reporter spilling so many of her secrets?

Her power to mythologize is so great that it must extend even to the stories she tells of her own life. Early in “Goodbye to All That,” Didion writes, “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” But by writing years later, she already knows the ending; she alone controls the narrative. In life, sure, it’s easy to concede that “things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” but writing is different from life, and the contrast between the two in Slouching Towards Bethlehem makes the former a much more appealing occupation.

***

This is part of an ongoing series, produced in partnership with Tumblr Storyboard, to highlight Tumblr writers (and the books they love). This is the last in our Storyboard series, but you can still submit your Last Book I Loved essay to LBIL (at) therumpus (dot) net — with the name of your book in the subject line.

Related Posts:

• The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
• Have you always wanted to write for The Rumpus?
• FUNNY WOMEN #97: The Whitest Album
• The Last Book I Loved: History of the Peloponnesian War
• Diamonds and Rust #1: Nostalgia, Form and Noise

I was in eighth grade and my favorite aunt and uncle were moving to a new home. They were young—my aunt Patty is eighteen years younger than my father, only eleven years older than I am, and she was everything that I thought was good and exciting in this world. She introduced me to Bon Jovi, and her boyfriend, who would later become my favorite uncle Shawn, had hair as long as hers. He played the drums and loved KISS, and though I never really liked KISS, I started playing the drums because of him. What made them so magnetic, though, was that they took me seriously, always. They took me seriously enough that when they were moving, Shawn opened up his boxes of college textbooks and pulled out a few he thought I would like. One was Thucydides. I don’t remember the others, but I remember that I was the kind of young person an adult (a really groovy adult) thought would like this book. Which is to say I was a grandiose, pretentious little shit. My one defense, perhaps, was that I did actually read the Impressive Books I carried around. If I was pretentious, at least I tried to be an authentic kind of pretentious. I don’t know that I read them well, but read them I did—except Thucydides. Even at the height of my Homer fanaticism, I don’t remember even opening it, even looking at the table of contents. That was seventeen years ago. Three degrees. Four moves to four different states. In all of that time, I’ve done nothing more with Thucydides than shelve and unshelve it, box and unbox. Better, more well-loved books have been given away in all of those moves. It’s not even that it has sentimental value—Shawn likely doesn’t even remember that I have it. I don’t think we ever had a conversation about anything approaching the topic, either. I’ve thrown away their wedding card (and everyone else’s). Why keep this book?

The only answer I can think of is that this book was a gauntlet. It’s not that anyone threw it at my feet in challenge, but there it was, the unread reminder, until this past summer.

I was having a conversation on Twitter @cfCollision, who I have never actually met, but whose writing I admire and who I like all out of proportion to how much we actually know each other (basically not at all), and he brought up The Peloponnesian War as a personal favorite. All day every day I see people online praising and recommending books, and sometimes I read them but more often I don’t. I’m not sure what about this conversation actually made me pick up Thucydides, but I did. What I found was a strange and most welcome kind of company. It isn’t that Thucydides’ writing (albeit in translation) had anything in common with my own, but (odd as it seems) he sounds like people I know. The sentences are dry and acerbic and often palpably exasperated. In commenting on the Trojan War, Thucydides writes,

[T]here is no reason why we should not believe that the Trojan expedition was the greatest that had ever taken place. It is equally true that it was not on the scale of what is done in modern warfare. It is questionable whether we can have complete confidence in Homer’s figures, which, since he was a poet, were probably exaggerated.

Fucking poets (and so say many of us, particularly as we understand that, for Thucydides, the “poet” was anyone involved in the creation of story—whether it was song or play or fireside tale). I am reminded of the person who recommended the book to me, whose incredibly low threshold for bullshit is something I frankly envy. I am reminded of my graduate school friend Patrick, who was cynical, impatient, and incredibly brusque, and also one of the most intelligent, most secretly kind people I’ve ever met.I love this book for what feel like the wrong reasons. I am used to loving books for their story or their language or the very construction of their sentences—something that says content in one way or another. But I have to admit to only the most passing interest in the matter of the Peloponnesian War. The pretentious eighth grader in me is gratified to know a bit more about it, to say “look at this knowledge I now have,” but the rest of me is often bored by the minutiae of negotiations as Thucydides relates them, and relate them he does. The book contains set speeches, the terms of treaties—as one expects a solid history to do. But there’s also a lot of commentary on the process, on the state of humanity, and Thucydides asks the same questions we are still asking. Thucydides shakes the same crotchety finger I shake at my composition students:

In investigating past history, and in forming the conclusions which I have formed, it must be admitted that one cannot rely on every detail which has come down to us by way of tradition. People are inclined to accept all stories of ancient times in an uncritical way—even when these stories concern their own native countries….Most people, in fact, will not take trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.

And yet, Thucydides is no particularly objective recorder. In discussing his methods for relaying those speeches, he writes,

I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches which I listened to myself and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty; so my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.

Thucydides faces the creative non-fiction writer’s dilemma but demonstrates not the slightest bit of doubt in approaching it. He has found his solution to his own satisfaction, and he pushes on, recreating long verbal missives from one camp to another, from one tyrant to the next. It is impossible to read forward with complete academic confidence, then—he confesses to taking liberties not three paragraphs beyond the imprecation to never take anything at face value. But he admits to the taking of liberties, and the prose is so emphatic, so certain. I seldom feel so convinced by myself. I wedge my fingertips between the pages and believe in osmosis.The translator’s note in my edition, written by Rex Warner, begins, “It is difficult, pleasurable, and bold to attempt to translate Thucydides into English.” Warner’s note explores the doubt that underwrites translation as a whole, the knowledge that something will inevitably be lost in the process, but also that there is so much to be gained from the task. Warner nearly apologizes for his work, but he seems unable to keep himself from attempting the challenge of Thucydides. I like to believe that that’s what my uncle Shawn was thinking when he gave such a book to an adolescent: in reading it well before I was of an age or an experience to understand more than simply the words and events, something would inevitably be lost, if I ever even read it. Reading Thucydides would be difficult, but maybe I would feel bold in doing so, and either in the content or the undertaking, I might find something pleasurable.

I didn’t read it then, and having read it now, I don’t feel bold. The reading was difficult—I couldn’t let my attention lapse for a sentence or two, couldn’t skim if I wanted to know the fullness of the events. I did lapse, though. I did skim. Ultimately, I didn’t care as much as I wanted to about the debate at Camarina. But in Thucydides’s tone, in his interrogation of uncertain facts and his assertion of his own reconstructions, in the way the act of reading re-tied me to people—no matter how little-known or now-distant—there was familiarity and connection, and I can think of no greater pleasure.

***

This is part of an ongoing series, produced in partnership with Tumblr Storyboard, to highlight Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here. We’ll publish our favorites every Friday for the next five weeks.

Related Posts:

• The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
• Have you always wanted to write for The Rumpus?
• The Last Book I Loved: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
• The Last Book I Loved: Cataclysm Baby
• The Last Book I Loved: Brown Girl, Brownstones

The stories are set in a world twisted by the end of days, a skewed world filled with darkness, terror, and danger. Instead of focusing on the cataclysm of the world, the book turns our attention to stories narrated by 26 different fathers struggling to raise children and create families against the backdrop of a doomed planet and amidst environmental chaos. The setting gives way to imperfect fathers and kids that are born inhuman, some physically—sons born covered in fur, daughters that resemble sirens—some otherwise. The combination unglues the modern sense of parental love and authority and shows that there really is no set paradigm to raising a family.

The book is molded by Matt Bell’s writing, which is at once sad, beautiful, darkly funny, and refreshing. Bell is so steady and deliberate in the physicality of his prose that I found myself rereading passages aloud multiple times to feel the weight of each word. There is purpose and intent behind the brittle fur, the bones poking through skin, the thick clots of blood and flesh, the tears staining parents’ faces. His deeply unsettling characters feel real and sympathetic. The setting, despite its supernatural tendencies, feels wholly natural.

Parenthood is in the foreground of the blood, the dirt-borne daughters, the flesh-hungry children. The book asks questions that feel oddly universal: How do you survive and take care of your children when the world is undergoing such rapid change and chaos? How do you maintain traditional familial roles when the children you see as flawed are merely an evolving present tense, a natural part of a future that you can’t stop? What makes a “good father”?

I’ve been asking myself similar questions about fatherhood, not because I plan to be a father soon but because of how I see my father now. I see the age, the wrinkles, the years in which he would never know me, and his attempts to know me now when it feels too late. Our relationship is complicated at best. His time away from home when I was young and his rigid Korean traditions that, at times, border on xenophobia have kept him at a constant distance. Even in my adulthood, I have this inherent feeling that I will never quite match up to his expectations, and I ask myself why I need to match up to those expectations in the first place.

I remember in kindergarten, my school had a celebration for Father’s Day. You bring your father to school—when really he’s the one bringing you—and they have a big party with food and activities. They did the same for mothers on Mother’s Day. I remember a picture of my mother and me painting a spin art piece. A sheet of stiff cardstock spinning like a record. My mother and I squeezing bits of paint onto it. I wanted so many colors until they all mixed into a muddy brown with orange and red streaks. My father and I never made it, but I remember the intention, the want for it.

We showered together that day. I think I said something or did something or was a bad son, enough to annoy him. “If you don’t want to go, we don’t have to go,” he says in the shower. He turns off the water. He dries off. He leaves the bathroom and turns off the light. I sit in the tub, cold. I think I’m crying, but I can’t tell with the water still on me, dripping from my hair. I know when I step out that I will have to confront…something, that something bad will happen, so I stay in the tub. I think I sit there for half an hour, naked and shaking. I remember the crack on the hinged side of the door closest to me, the white light streaming in on the other. I don’t remember what happens next. I don’t know what my father says. I know he doesn’t come back for me. I know there are no pictures or spin art. I stand and tremble and dry off.

My favorite story in Cataclysm Baby is “Justina, Justine, Justise.” A man is put to trial for his adulterous crimes by his three blind daughters. They amputate his thumb, then his hand. He seeks consolation from the one daughter who defended him. “She meets my apologies with a slap, squirms free. She says, Don’t think I’m still daddy’s little girl. She says, I only defended you because no one else would. She says, In justice, we are divided, but in punishment, we are one.”

I understand their judgment, not from the perspective of the unfaithful father, but as one of the daughters, as the persecutor, the judge, the jury. I think about kindergarten and the years that followed when my father was a distant, intimidating figure, but I sympathize with the father in the story—in all the stories, really—and the pain he endures. I know the looks I give my father, the silent criticisms, the hurt he feels, and the life he missed in order to support his family. As I write this, I realize that I’m not as angry at my father as I’d thought. I am disappointed and scared of the person I’ve become and the good son I never truly was, and I am sad for the father I never truly knew. I don’t know if we will have a happy end, but Cataclysm Baby gives me hope that, even in the midst of apocalypse, there is still time to forgive, embrace, and build up from the dirt.

***

This is part of an ongoing series, produced in partnership with Tumblr Storyboard, to highlight Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here. We’ll publish our favorites every Friday for the next six weeks.

Related Posts:

• Sacrifice and Selfishness
• The Rumpus Interview with Matt Bell
• The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
• Have you always wanted to write for The Rumpus?
• The Last Book I Loved: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Occasionally, after these fantasies, I return to Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, originally published in 1959 by Random House. As with many books, my allegiances to certain characters evolve over time and with age. As a teenager, Beneatha Younger from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun was my afro-haired spirit animal, always being smacked down (literally) by the elders in her life for her spunk and willingness to redefine her place as a black woman in America and in her family, always questioning and never satisfied. Just before I turned 30, and after a couple of failed relationships with men who had ill-defined or nonexistent ambitions, my allegiances turned to Beneatha’s sister-in-law, Ruth Younger. Ruth, who did so much and asked for so little, who faced economic realities that caused her to consider an abortion while her husband was waxing poetic about liquor stores.

In Brown Girl, Brownstones, which I read two years ago, I started out heavily involved with and invested in the protagonist, Selina Boyce—a second generation Bajan-American living in Brooklyn—and have lately embraced Selina’s mother, Silla, who is similar to my own mother and her American dream-centered ambitions. A South Side Chicago girl (Chatham to be precise) with college-educated parents, my mother gave directives to her female offspring that were very clear: get good grades, do a stint in Jack and Jill, go to college, avoid out-of-wedlock births, procure a good job and, perhaps later, a husband and children. In that exact order.

Selina is given similar instructions from her mother, who dreams of owning a Brooklyn brownstone: join the Barbadian church group, get good grades, become a doctor, meet an “acceptable” guy—a member of the community—and buy a brownstone. In that exact order. Though the story focuses on Selina’s coming of age in terms of her ethnicity, class, and sexuality (it is no accident that subsequent editions of the book were published by The Feminist Press at the City University of New York), it is Silla’s dreams of owning a brownstone that haunt me.

This is not to say that Selina’s struggle is any less compelling. Her teenage rebellion, culminating in a dramatic outburst intent on embarrassing her mother, struck a note in me, as I pulled a similarly childish stunt during a Jack and Jill conference while in high school. How clever I thought I was, railing against bougie pretensions in that petulant teenage pitch (you know the one). Yet in my thirties, I find myself comparing my life to my mother’s at this same age, understanding what she wanted of me and desiring it on my own. Career. Husband. Children. House. In that order. A yard built for raising a family and upon one can look out on from behind the aforementioned curtains, watching the world go by.

Silla is portrayed as cruel and oppressive, unyielding. Her children fear her; her husband Deighton spites her. “For always the mother’s voice was a net flung wide, ensnaring all within its reach,” Marshall writes. Through Selina’s eyes, Silla is like a chapter from the Book of Ruth, Hansberry edition, without the empathy. Yet, as a 30-something woman, I can understand how she might have turned so bitter, so angry, raising three children in poverty while her husband pursued whims like being a trumpet player, an accountant, a radio repairman, or a car mechanic with the unrealistic fervor reserved for buying lotto tickets, and leaving Silla to be the main financial contributor. She earns her family’s money as a domestic, dealing with subtle and aggressive racism all day long while working on her knees. Her desire to own four walls and a roof are simple in comparison. The brutal way Silla and Deighton wreck each other midway through the book, I see years later, as a commentary on how easily the American dream and capitalism can corrupt even the most earnest desires.

Reading the contrasts between Selina and Silla reminds me of a stretch of time in my twenties. It’s a period in which you feel smugly certain that your life is vastly different from your mother’s. You don’t imagine that your mother fell in love with inappropriate men and had sex just because she liked a guy’s dimples. You don’t imagine that your mom wanted to take off and live in another city to live a grand adventure, or explored bohemian scenes, or lived selfishly, or did only things to please herself—sleeping until noon, smoking, or leaving work early. So you do those things with gusto and abandon, but before you know it, you are speaking to a child in the same way your mother spoke to you, or giving your boss the same look your mom gave you when she knew you were lying.

At a critical point in Brown Girl, Brownstones, Selina makes peace with the ways she is like her mother, in a quietly devastating way.

“Everybody used to call me Deighton’s Selina but they were wrong. Because you see I’m truly your child. Remember how you used to talk about how you left home and came here alone as a girl of eighteen and was your own woman? I used to love hearing that. And that’s what I want. I want it!

Silla’s pained eyes searched her adamant face, and after a long time a wistfulness softened her mouth. It was as if she somehow glimpsed in Selina the girl she had always been.”

The summer I read this book, I made a similar peace with my mother. I began calling and Skyping home more, trying to bridge a physical distance of more than 900 miles. On holidays, we’re hugging more, and listening. I’ve inherited her voice and wry mannerisms. I’ve fulfilled some of both of our desires, but also understand more about her extremely rich experiences. I imagine that a Brown Girl, Brownstones sequel would show Selina, back in Brooklyn after her excursion to Barbados, shaking her head knowingly at a young, Angela Davis-crowned version of herself. She would probably tell her to mind the bohemians and beware of men with idle hearts and hands. The daughter will pursue her own dreams, evolving over time, just as her mother once also did.

***

This is part of an ongoing series, produced in partnership with Tumblr Storyboard, to highlight Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here. We’ll publish our favorites every Friday for the next seven weeks.

Related Posts:

• The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
• Have you always wanted to write for The Rumpus?
• The Last Book I Loved: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
• The Last Book I Loved: History of the Peloponnesian War
• The Last Book I Loved: Cataclysm Baby

My relationship with John Berryman’s Dream Songs, like the songs themselves, is murky, complicated, obscure in origin, and not easy to explain—not even to myself. One signpost of great art, it seems to me, is that the meaning of its greatness shifts in relation to the reader over time, and my appreciation of The Dream Songs has deepened and evolved—as I expect it will continue to for the rest of my life—in the two decades since it first came to my attention.

In my twenties I knew that Berryman was, like me, an alcoholic, and that he committed suicide in Minneapolis in 1972, and being at an age susceptible to the romantic myth of the doomed, hard-drinking mystic, the messy glamour of the dissolute—before I came to know (that is, in real terms, hard terms, blood terms) the cost of that myth—I was intrigued. I knew too that he was considered a brilliant and impenetrable poet, an impression that was confirmed by my first casual glance into an edition of 77 Dream Songs on the shelf of my boss’s office in Cambridge.

These were not like other poems: within their consistent 16-line armature they were turbulent, mad, feverish, cryptic, an unruly union of boppy jive-talk, and thorny quasi-Elizabethan diction. It was impossible to tell who was speaking, or to whom; poems ended in mid-syllable, bristled with random phrases in foreign languages, sported menacing-looking accent marks and Shakespearean contractions, were riddled with ampersands and ellipses. The whole thing was messy, hallucinatory, and impossible to resist; it was the Exile on Main Street of poetry, and I was hooked.

As the shadows over my own life lengthened, scattered phrases accrued talismanic power. “He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back,” begins number 45; then, “I’m too alone. I see no end” and “Lightning fell silent where the Devil knelt.” “Hell talkt my brain awake,” says Henry, the mysterious semi-protagonist, at one point, and it seemed as fit a phrase for my existence—insomniac, deeply unhappy—as any. Safely on the other side of life again at age 32, I was given for my birthday, by my parents, a very nearly mint-condition first edition of the complete cycle, the celebrated Farrar Straus hardcover from 1968, featuring Charles Skaggs’s bold white-pink-and-green typography. The interior design, which follows the template set by the brilliant Guy Fleming for the original 1964 edition of 77 Dream Songs, is austere and beautiful, with that slightly antique feel of openness and clarity that seems particular to book design of that era. (Someday I would like an expert in the history of typography to explain to me how this is so). I have it in front of me now, paging through it as I try to capture, clumsily, the strange beauty of this half-understood work, to anatomize its appeal. 

The Dream Songs collectively is many things: a record of a consciousness, a song cycle, an ongoing formalist experiment, a journal of an imaginary insanity, a high-modernist word collage, and an elegy for a generation of poets. The work as a whole is death-haunted, with each successive passing of another poet or peer—Jarrell, Roethke, Schwartz, Williams—bringing a yearning elegy, grave and often touching, as the poet bends his soul towards the haven that they have found and that he will gain only through force of self-violence. As the songs pile up and the years pass the prosody becomes starker, cleaner, marginally more transparent, yet somehow purer in its despair: the world’s longest and most eloquent suicide note. There is also an engagingly quotidian quality to the work, as in a journal: occasional mentions of the outside world, of presidents, the Cold War, the Congo, Vietnam, peek through the whirling kaleidoscope of the poet / narrator’s brain, like a slideshow of the darkening sixties playing in an adjacent room. Other songs seem to hint acidly at the growing professional and academic demands of Berryman’s career. All of this is filtered through a blurry, argumentative stream of voices that is extremely difficult to decode, Berryman’s own note—Henry is “not the poet, not me”—being of limited assistance in the matter.

Better minds than mine have tried to identify a consistent schema of speakerly identification for the Songs, which seem to be narrated from a kind of shifting first-and-a-half-person, the half-person being the poet’s unseen companion, who addresses him as “Mr. Bones” in the rhythms of a not entirely convincing African-American patois, and who may be a schizophrenic counterpart of the narrator and/or Henry. What is to my mind undeniable about the poems is the sense of mystery, of the uncanny, of a shifting, fully inhabited interior consciousness, however opaque or inaccessible, that they convey. Not everyone agrees: the great postwar critic M. L. Rosenthal, for one, thought that The Dream Songs was a step backwards for Berryman, calling it “work we must forage (in) too much on our own.”

It’s an interesting word, “forage,” and apt, for to my mind, a mental “foraging” is in fact the primary experience of reading, especially work so dense and demanding as Berryman’s. And the fruits of my expeditions into the verbal thickets left behind by this brilliant, sad, unlucky, intense man, are a paradoxically heightened sense of freedom and gratitude, an attentiveness to the air and light around me, the twinkling of the city at night, a hunger for “tasting all the secret bits of life.”

***

This is part of an ongoing series, produced in partnership with Tumblr Storyboard, to highlight Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here. We’ll publish our favorites every Friday for the next eight weeks.

Related Posts:

• The Last Book I Loved: Skagboys
• Last Book I Loved + Tumblr Storyboard
• The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
• Have you always wanted to write for The Rumpus?
• The Last Book I Loved: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Even those who wouldn’t count themselves among Welsh’s enthusiasts have come to know his signature mix of gritty realism with charming and yet wholly terrible characters through film adaptations of his work that have been made over the years. Ewan McGregor’s portrayal of Mark “Rent Boy” Renton won over those who couldn’t be bothered to decipher Welsh’s lavish use of Scottish slang, and a worldwide brand based on Renton’s “Choose Life” speech was born. Porno, the sequel, was very good (in my opinion arguably better than its predecessor) but failed to enter the public consciousness quite so effortlessly. And although I had high hopes, I could never have predicted how much I would enjoy the prequel to the Heroin Chic trilogy: Skagboys.

It is a testament to Welsh’s ability that the first and last books he has ever written should somehow still link together so fluidly. It helps, of course, that he has a personal connection to the subject matter, being born and bred in Leith and Edinburgh. Still, prequels can end up being romanticized versions of the first novel, with the author using the newer book more as a platform to correct the mistakes they made in the former rather than to formulate any real backstory. More than one critic suggested that since Skagboys is primarily put together from material that didn’t make it into Trainspotting, it’d be nothing more than an “a lashed-together series of outtakes and bloopers.” But Skagboys is nothing of the sort; Rents, Sick Boy, and sweet addled Spud are the same as ever—only here they are pre-skag and still naïve about a world that will leave them jaded and vicious in a few books’ time.

Described as “basically about how Renton and Sick Boy went from being daft young guys just out for the buzz on drugs to total junkies” by its author, Skagboys is a warning to those who find parallels with the characters within it against the all-consuming power of drugs. Renton is once again the primary narrator, and he is so convincing in his constant self-assurance that what he’s doing is normal that you almost don’t register how completely unreasonable it is for a boy who liked a drink to become a junkie trying to break into a factory. Learning more about his history helps us understand why Rents is how he is: angry, bitter, and yet not completely without tenderness, albeit a clumsy kind that seems to do nothing but land him in more trouble. We hear about his disabled younger brother, whose death more-or-less tears his family apart, putting strain on any hopes of finding salvation there in his later, heroin-addled years. Most intriguingly, we find out about his time at university, and how he did once seem to be a promising student with a girlfriend, aspirations, and a future away from Leith all mapped out. Somehow Skagboys manages to surprise me when this all goes to pot, even though having read Trainspotting I knew there was no other way for it to go—which I like to think is a show of Welsh’s skill rather than my own forgetfulness.

Sick Boy, in all his sleazy, charming glory, is as horrible and endearing as he ever is, but in this novel we begin to understand how he displays so much charisma while also mentally undressing and tossing you aside. The Scots-Italian background vaguely mentioned in Trainspotting is explained further, and it becomes a spot-on metaphor for his half-aggressive bully and half-purring Lothario persona. He is the antithesis of the boy that your mum thinks you should be with, but he’s the boy that you really want to be with, and he’s probably the boy that your mum really wants to be with as well. Sick Boy makes your skin crawl, and towards the end of the book he shows himself to be so ruthlessly cruel it almost beggars belief that he could possibly be seen as attractive, and yet he somehow is. In a nutshell, that’s what he’s all about. You hate him and hate him and hate him but deep down, you know you love him—everybody does.

As for Spud: Spud is the personification of why I love Skagboys so dearly. He is such a useless sweetheart, a cat-loving criminal with a conscience and no common sense. Although the tale for the others is one of a downward spiral, Spud’s is more of a plateau. He turns to drugs because there is nothing else for him. He isn’t particularly well-educated or knowledgeable about the world. He’s got a really big heart, but that will hardly help you in Thatcher’s Britain. His particular idiosyncrasy for calling everybody “catboy” is one I have always found unexpectedly touching, and in general his odd sense of morality and duty towards vulnerable creatures, whether they are old ladies, animals, or suicidal girls, has always stood him apart as the most lovable character of Welsh’s books.

In essence, I love Skagboys because however deplorable its protagonists are, I really do want them to succeed. I want them to turn their lives around, get clean, end up fulfilled and well out of Scotland. I’m rooting for it from page one, which, due to the nature of it being a prequel, is as useless as watching Titanic and hoping it will all turn out okay. And yet Welsh forces me into doing it anyway. The fact that Trainspotting exists means that all hope that Skagboys inspires is necessarily false hope, and that’s what makes it such a good read. Any book that can fool you into thinking that there is a chance of redemption when you know there is none—that can make you hope for a “happily ever after” even though you’ve read the “after” and it certainly isn’t happy—is one that is worth reading.

***

This is part of an ongoing series, produced in partnership with Tumblr Storyboard, to highlight Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here. We’ll publish our favorites every Friday for the next nine weeks.

Related Posts:

• The Last Book I Loved: Dream Songs
• Last Book I Loved + Tumblr Storyboard
• The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
• Have you always wanted to write for The Rumpus?
• The Last Book I Loved: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Building on our Last Book I Loved series, we’re teaming up to highlight Tumblr writers and the books they love.

Got a book you can’t stop thinking about? Send us a writeup – a little bit book review and a lot about why you loved it – along with a short bio. Beginning next month, we’ll publish our favorites every Friday, both on Storyboard and right here on The Rumpus.

Visit our SUBMIT PAGE for more information — and get reading!

Related Posts:

• The Last Book I Loved: Dream Songs
• The Last Book I Loved: Skagboys
• The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
• Have you always wanted to write for The Rumpus?
• Improvising a Bone Graft

His is the generation of the dustbowl thirties, farmers losing their homesteads, the Depression. The country lurched from Herbert Hoover’s “chicken in every pot – car in every garage” to the Great Depression, to the singular focus on World War II in two geographic theaters to the cozy “Eisenhower prosperity.” McGrath’s telling peels away political gloss with such physical momentum that one wonders how the language produced such rhythms – and one suspects that it could be the other way around – that the poet’s somatic rhythm funneled mere words into a rocking, epic poem. The section titled “III.” is a miniature of what it is to read McGrath.

His legendary six beat line opens the poem’s narration, “Out of the whirring lamp-hung dusk my mother calls.” Absence of commas feeds his momentum. How much more powerful a mother’s call out of a whirring lamp-hunk dusk than out of a kitchen door. And, one might think a rhythm is established yet six lines down in the opening stanza, he describes fields, “Where the thresher mourns and showers on the morning stillness/a bright fistful of whistles.” So much for cockadoodle-doo on the farm! His grandfather dances as his mother polishes a pan on her apron and feeds the stove, “It’s iron, round crackling mouth and throat full of bristling flame” – conceivably eight down beats in that line. We’re proverbially off to the races on this farm – a race of rhythm, language, imagery and a sense that everything in the story is in motion.

The part of the story that is autobiographical – which Letter to an Imaginary Friend combines with poetry of witness and cause – keeps us on the farm for breakfast, the sleepy eyed awakening of younger siblings, goodbye kisses of mother as “I drove the big roan team through the grey of the chill morning…” Another cacophonic line with complex rhythm that heralds great change placed as it is situated among much shorter lines and structures for the mother’s goodbyes. This is not just a boy going to work on a farm. It is a rite of passage to adulthood where he will encounter people and injustices that are beyond his knowledge. With a pronounced indentation, he begins the precise narrative, “Entered too soon, too young/ Bobbing along on the lines, dragged by a team of roans,/ (Whose names should have been Poverty and Pride)/ Into the world of men at the age of nine”

The complexity defies a short review. “The rites of passage toward the stranger’s country,/ the secret language foreign as a beard…” tell in two succinct lines that poet/narrator is growing into puberty as he discovers a broader country that is his home.

He whirrs us through a rocking engine, an extraordinary sensualization of a feeder’s function to his conclusion. “Was it hard? I don’t know. It was terrifying.” A very young man’s try at toughness and denial only to come up with a poet’s honesty. He worked on the farm, a summer in which his father took him to the edges of a new world. “But mostly Cal, one of the bundle teamsters,/ My sun-blackened Virgil of the spitting circle,/ Led me from depth to depth. (Note the wide indentation here like a deep breath or a sigh). / Toward the light/ I was too young to enter.”

The immersion of the young man into a new world. Only a line later he refers to The Industrial Worker and the Wobs. Wikipedia describes “”the voice of revolutionary industrial unionism,” as the newspaper of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical labor union…(sic) referred to as the Wobblies.” The young farm boy has traveled to the destiny of his voice. The stanza progresses to “The last of the real Wobs – that, too, I didn’t know,/Couldn’t.”

These are pivotal moments when McGrath as a boy gains foundation for the larger world he will travel.

Labor troubles began on the rigs, “ Into the blackened stubble that shut like a fan toward the headland -/ the strike started then. Why then I didn’t know./ Cal spoke for the men and my uncle cursed him.” Here the poet, who will take strong positions later in his narrative, is taking the reader autobiographically through his own confusion and immersion. The next sections of III. are gorgeous young poet-man escaping-ruminating-absorbing and being absorbed in detail of nature, the surrounding of his life.

Cal is destined for a bad end. (Deep indent) “Along toward morning/ I heard the rattle of Fords. They had left Cal there/ in the bloody dust that day but they wouldn’t work after that./ ‘The folded arms of the workers’ I heard Warren saying, / Sometime in the future where Mister Peets Lies dreaming/ Of a universal voting machine…” Cal becomes a symbol of injustice – and this only the beginning of McGrath’s epic.

I believe we are still working on the ‘universal voting machine.’

Related Posts:

• The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
• Have you always wanted to write for The Rumpus?
• The Last Book I Loved: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
• The Last Book I Loved: History of the Peloponnesian War
• The Last Book I Loved: Cataclysm Baby