Makioka Sisters Book Club

At the last meeting, I was asked if I would talk a little about poetry at the next meeting. I feel very self-conscious about trying to do this because some members may not be all that interested in contemporary poetry and I can’t imagine anything less interesting than hearing someone drone on about something I don’t really have any interest in – like ice hockey, for example. If any Makiokas started opening each meeting with a little talk about ice hockey I’d have to start being conspicuously late for every meeting. And also, I feel nervous about it because I’m a neophyte in the realm of poetry. I’ve only been seriously reading and writing it for about four years, and I think it’s the kind of thing you can do for decades and still only grasp a small sliver of – but I’ll try my best.

One reason I’m going to plunge ahead with this is because our upcoming book, Blind Assassin, presents such a good opportunity to talk a little about poetry that it seemed like a little bit of a sign. In addition to being a novelist, Margaret Atwood is also a poet, a well-regarded, award-winning poet. In fact, in keeping with the signs in favor of taking up this poetry discussion, I stumbled on her poetry collection, The Circle Game, the other day while I was looking through my shelves for something unrelated for a work assignment.

Unfortunately, Atwood is sort of a challenging poet and not really the easiest introduction to contemporary poetry. In fact, her work is a bit upsetting and difficult, abstract and full of some fairly savage imagery (this will be no surprise to anyone who has read or is reading Blind Assassin).

So I think it would be good to start by reading and thinking about this poem by Billy Collins (former Westchester County resident):

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/001.html

I’ll read it at the next meeting. But essentially what Collins is getting at is that you don’t need to “understand” poetry to enjoy it. In fact, the moment you insist on pegging a precise meaning to a poem you run the risk of robbing it of its possibility. Poetry is really the attempt to say the unsayable. If you think of a novel as a representational painting, then a poem is an abstract painting. I’m oversimplifying, of course; there are accessible, narrative poems that do convey very precise meaning and there are novels, like our last book club book, The Maytrees (written by another poet/novelist), that are not meant to render any obvious meanings and do not have a real plot in any linear way and that you have to work at to gain meaning from or else you have to simply give up the quest for obvious meaning and just enjoy the journey – which some of us did and some of us did not – enjoy the book I mean. I will say most contemporary poetry is probably closer to The Maytrees than to a typical plot-driven novel, so if you hated that experience, the chances of you loving an afternoon curled up with a contemporary poetry collection are probably slim.

Anyway here’s Margaret Atwood reading some of her poetry:

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=96#

And I’ll bring a poem that she does not recite at the URL above but that seems to me to cover some of the same ground as Blind Assassin to the next meeting.

- Lisa