"Recipes for Poets" and Two Book Reviews

I hope everyone's having a beautiful day. No more charging moose up here today, but I did bike past a mother and two calves yesterday afternoon: they'd unashamedly taken possession of a neighbor's front lawn, despite her three horses and two dogs close by. Been a long winter and frozen alder twigs offer meager sustenance: they must be so excited for the grass!

When we left for our trip three weeks ago, I was perplexed by an identity crisis of sorts, hinging on whether it's ok to talk about food so much when it's poetry that holds my life together. Thanks to a post from Erin, my attention was drawn to the 32 poems blog and the invitation there to participate in a round-up of recipes for poets. Most poets have other work that distracts attention from their art, you see, so time management is of the essence. Especially when you've just been on a trip and are discombobulated and finding it hard to get back down to any kind of work; when checking Paris Review or reading blogs seems terribly urgent, even if far less important than the real work. I've spent much of today translating Greek lemmata and am feeling better.

So, on May 20th--two days away--I'll be posting a twenty minute recipe that would provide a healthy meal to a poet, or anyone else, without much time-donation. I was supposed to say so by May 15th, but I hope they'll have me anyway. I'm excited to connect with other poets who also love to write about food: a sense of camaraderie will eclipse any anxieties about not fitting neatly under one specific label. I'll stick with something spring-like and delicious. Maybe the next day, I'll share some specifics of my latest diet tweak plus exercise ramp-up that I mentioned.

There are several book clubs in Homer. I'm in two of them and both happen to meet on the same day, which was yesterday. So, I read two very different books in quick succession: one non-fiction, one fiction, both 'first books,' both written by women around my own age (yes, I felt envy!). Book club reminds me of seminars in grad school in certain ways, although I have to be careful not to think of it like that too much. But there's the same sense of stimulation from hearing others' thoughts, the same imperative to walk the tightrope of diplomacy and forcefulness when delivering my own observations.

In the first book club, we read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. This is the story of the woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951, but whose cervical cancer cells had been cultured before her death and continue to live and divide to this day. It is also the story of her family, indigent, black, uneducated, who were not informed of any of this until much later, and their attempts to understand and also simply to survive in the world.

It's an impressive and informative read: I appreciated the refresher in basic biology and was fascinated and appalled by turns to read of the sociohistoric and medical ethics aspect of the story. And the thoroughness of the research both of the scientific facts and of the human connections, the actual people involved in the story, was magnificent and truly respectful to those involved. I kept imagining the writing process of this book: the reader is allowed to feel very close to that process.

Everyone in the book club was similarly impressed. It provoked some interesting discussion among us over medical ethics and whether a person owns their discarded body parts.

In the second book club, there was unanimity also, and this time there were more misgivings in it. We read Michelle Hoover's The Quickening: a novel set in Depression-era agricultural Iowa and told through the alternating perspectives of two very different farm women, neighbors.

It is a bleak story, as befits the era and place perhaps. In terms of the 'show, don't tell' dictum, there is very little 'telling' as such and the 'showing' is effected through the taciturn diction of the time and place. This means that so many things are implied or half-said, one has to read between the lines a lot. I 'got' the various implications and felt inveigled into a world of closed doors and mouths, where one might understand weighty events only dimly, be ostracized for little reason, go into labor before realizing one was pregnant. However, several other people didn't 'get' them and felt both confused and annoyed with the author for not being clear. If she wants us to know what happened in the story, the argument went, what does she gain by sort-of half-showing it and then bringing it up in full much later?

I find these kinds of criticisms very instructive, and apply them to my own writing, since (as an avowed Heraclitus-lover) I have an affinity for riddles and obscurity. If several people don't 'get' something I've written when I share it at writers' group, I usually revise it. It's a judgment call we all have to make: touching the mystery without obfuscating. (Did I just obfuscate by my choice of word there?)