2021 reads, #54. Big news -- for the first time in twenty years, I've started writing poetry again! And unlike last time, this time it ain't any of th2021 reads, #54. Big news -- for the first time in twenty years, I've started writing poetry again! And unlike last time, this time it ain't any of that poetry-slam nonsense either, but actual formal poetry based on actual classic poetry forms, things like sonnets and haikus and other thousand-year-old traditions. As part of my research into what the genre of poetry currently contains, this month I'm doing what I consider a really interesting reading of four anthologies in a row, all four of which have very different flavors:
--A collection of what's called "the American people's favorite poems," a project put together by Robert Pinsky back when he was the US Poet Laureate under the Clinton administration, in which over 18,000 random Americans made nominations for their favorite poem of all time, and Pinsky and others selected several hundred to include in the book;
--The Best American Poetry 2020 anthology, published by Scribner and with pieces hand-selected by a different famous guest editor each year, which ideally should give me an idea of what kind of work is appealing to people in the literary community at this exact moment in history;
--The 90th anniversary anthology of Poetry magazine, featuring several hundred pieces hand-selected by their editors as a good overview of the best the magazine has published over the last century (almost all of it modern free verse, which is what the magazine originally got famous for when first established in the Modernist 1920s);
--And today's anthology, the most traditional of the lot, which I thought would be a good one to start with, since it's an overview of what was generally considered the best poetry in existence up to the start of the Modernist era and the invention of free verse. Published by Columbia University, The Classic Hundred is actually an "anthology of anthologies," assembling over 400 other academic tomes and then aggregating all their tables of content in order to determine the hundred most frequently republished poems in these 400 anthologies. As such, then, it's largely a primer to history's most famous poetry, but by definition contains almost no modern work at all (only 17 pieces here are from the 20th century whatsoever, and I don't think there's a single poem from World War Two to the present day), and in uncharitable terms might also be defined as a primer to all the hoary old "thee" and "thou" crap you were forced to read in high school, and which turned you off poetry for good.
So does this make the book a valuable read or not? Good question! On the one hand, this book takes a lot of freaking patience to get through, and I had to limit myself to only five or ten per day so to not get burned out on all the flowery purple prose on display here, as good an example as any to why a disgusted literary community invented free verse modern poetry at the beginning of the 20th century to begin with. But on the other hand, this was my first chance to read what's widely considered many of the best poems ever written in human history, and gave me a gentle starting point for falling down the rabbit holes later this year of Early Romanticism, Shakespearean sonnets, the huge resurgence in popularity poetry went through during the Victorian Age, and a lot more. It was also this anthology that taught me that the famous phrase "season of mists" comes from John Keats, "miles to go before I sleep" from Robert Frost, "gather ye rose-buds while ye may" from Robert Herrick, "death be not proud" from John Donne, "slouching towards Bethlehem" and "no country for old men" from William Butler Yeats, "look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair" from Percy Shelley, and "shall I compare thee to a summer's day" from William Shakespeare, as well as that Robert Oppenheimer gave the atomic bomb tests the codename "Trinity" after Donne's poem "Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God;" and it could be argued that just this knowledge alone was worth the time to read this.
So all in all, a mixed bag; and unlike the novels I regularly review here at Goodreads, I suspect that whether or not you should read this anthology yourself depends a lot more on what you're looking to get out of poetry in the first place, and not so much on the objective quality of the manuscript itself. Since I must give it a score, I'm giving it 4 stars, to reflect the undeniable fact that many, many people consider these the best poems of all time; but be aware that that score quickly drops to zero stars if all you're interested in is modern verse, for example, or non-Western poetry forms like haiku (of which there isn't even a single one here). Keep it in mind when making your own decision about whether or not to pick it up; but as for me personally, I'm glad I did so, in that it gave me a strong sense of the formal fundamentals behind pre-Modernist poetry, which is what I'm most interested in writing myself. ...more
This latest by genre publisher D.X. Varos never quite tips over into the supernatural creature story it hints at the beginning it might become, but isThis latest by genre publisher D.X. Varos never quite tips over into the supernatural creature story it hints at the beginning it might become, but is instead an intelligently rambling look at what life in 1500s Italy among the nobility must've really been like, just married to a storyline that hints at supernatural evil among its edges. And why not? After all, author Erika Rummel is an award-winning history professor, and already the author of several commercially successful novels; it seems natural to bring her two passions together here for what I suppose you can call "Borgias Lite," as we follow the individual fates of not only a number of aristocrats but their assistants, staffers, tutors, astrologers, bankers, and more, within a pleasantly chaotic setting that gives us a grand scope of just how influential the Renaissance was starting to become across southern Europe, with scenes set from backwoods villages to Vatican City itself. Rummel does a particularly great job here at examining the curious cooperation and conflicts that happened between the superstitious, pre-science Medieval period the region was just growing out of in these years, and the rational, capitalist, politically savvy, science-embracing mercantile class that largely replaced the old church structure, sped up in no small part because of the violent Protestant Reformation that was going on at the same time. Rummel touches on all this and a lot more, as you would expect from an academe of her stature; and while perhaps its three-act structure never reaches the intensity or speed I would've liked to see it get at the end (the reason it's getting four stars instead of five), the leisurely stroll through the very real-seeming daily lives of these courtesans, countesses, merchants and priests is one many people will enjoy going on, even if there is always a rational explanation for everything and no sexy vampires. It comes recommended specifically to people who enjoy the genre and will be rooting for this to be good (i.e. forgiving of its small flaws)....more
Loading...
