39 Books: 1992

Poetry is a notable absence in my book lists. I assumed at this time that because novels excited my attention, poetry should do too. Under this assumption I bought and read Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems in this chunky Faber edition, adding an ugly plastic cover.*

Many of Stevens' lines still go around my head like song lyrics – slogans from an inert revolution – and there are many I reread in the glorious Collected Poetry & Prose edition published by the Library of America, but poetry is a foreign language I read without the inwardness of a native. A sign of this appeared when, in my student years, I detected something Heideggerian in Stevens' poetry and was smug when subsequently I discovered Frank Kermode's essay Dwelling Poetically in Connecticut.

Always this movement away. I am drawn to what others write about poetry – Geoffrey Hartman's essay on Wordsworth was a highlight last year – just as I like reading art criticism without having a great interest in looking at the paintings themselves. Perhaps it is the longue durée of narrative that I miss, which would explain why Dante is a major exception. This year was also the first time I read the whole of the Divine Comedy, as I took a course studying it after we'd read through the Odyssey, and the Aeneid.** 

A preference for long-form narrative would not explain why Paul Celan's poetry is also an exception. Except I think there is a connection between Dante's expansion and Celan's compression. It is not novels I am drawn to but those works that push literature to its limits, and not merely for the sake of it, as I suspect many Anglophone so-called experimental novelists do, in which length and complexity are assumed to be an unquestionable good, but those that subject writing to what is outside its generic boundaries. My distance from poetry is then an intolerance of generic safety; that old story. This may also explain why I am drawn to metafiction, itself an intolerable genre.

* My father did his engineering apprenticeship at a company that built steam engines. It was called Wallis & Steevens. No doubt he made notes towards a supreme traction...

** Alongside me in this tutorial group was someone who later became very famous in the UK and in his first TV appearance mentioned reading classical poetry. Unfortunately, I can't find the clip.