Saturday Good Reads: Slowing Down

This week didn’t start out in Frantic Mode – we first had to dig out from a 12-inch snow that arrived Sunday. (A huge thank you to the young man who knocked on our door Monday and asked if we needed our driveway shoveled.)

Then on Tuesday, as if to prove exercise is bad for you, I was riding the stationary bike at 6 a.m. prior to my workout with the personal trainer when a partial bridge in my mouth decided to relocate. So – it was pray that the dentist had some space to squeeze me in (he did).

And at work, a situation that had started the previous week was continuing to build, and build some more, until the tsunami arrived on Thursday, and ebbed only slightly by Friday afternoon. I finally had to stop Thursday night (Friday morning?) about 12:15 a.m.; I decided the crisis would be waiting for me when I woke up. It was.

What helped was watching a few Netflix videos and finding a few oases of calm in the online world, like the Saturday Good Reads below.

First, four poems.

Two by Steven Marty Grant at Urbanality, whose poetry always seems to transport me to New York City: Winter in Midtown and God Looks Down.

One by Chris Yokel, whose music I like as much as his poetry: Green Arms (A Good Friday Poem).

And one by Brian Miller, whom I first met at One Stop Poetry when it was going gangbusters and who’s now one of the movers behind dVersePoets: I’ll have the usual.

Am I the only person who reads poetry when things get crazy?

Then over at Slow Church, John Pattison posted a reflection on the novel Silence by Shasaku Endo, in honor of Endo’s birthday. I had read the novel three years ago (and even blogged about it a few times). Pattison’s article is well worth reading.

David Mathis at Desiring God did something unexpected and truly beautiful. He visited and interviewed the 96-year-old theologian Robert Duncan Culver, and came away with The Old Man and His Big Book.

I was rather awed by Culver and his razor-sharp mind, and I was also awed by something slightly older – a graffiti found during a 19^th century excavation of the Palantine Hill in Rome. Tim Challies at Informing the Reforming wrote about it in The History of Christianity in 25 Objects: the Alexamenos Graffito.

I learned something new on Friday. Lyla Lindquist, one of my colleagues over at Tweetspeak Poetry, has more than a slight interest in the Spanish language, and wrote about it in The Poetics of Learning (and Loving) Language.

And then John Blase at The Beautiful Due wrote one of the most original articles I’ve seen about Easter: What Do I Know?

Finally, Greg Sullivan at Sippican Cottage posted a short video the likes of which I’ve never seen. Well, I take that back. I’ve seen the actor Kenneth Branagh do it, but I’ve never seen the “We Happy Few” speech from Henry V by William Shakespeare performed like it is by this young actor.

Photograph by Jean Sander via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

New Edition of "Another Hotel Room"

Last November, I reviewed Another Hotel Room: Selected Poems 1988-2008 by Steven Marty Grant. He’s foremost a city poet, and I love how he lets the sense of the city seep right through the words of his poems.

A special Grace Notes Books edition of the work has been published, edited by poet Ruth Walters. It includes several additional poems, a foreword by screenwriter and poet Harmoni McGlothlin (publisher of Grace Notes Books) and an interview with Grant at the end.

You can read my review here.

The new edition on Amazon is here.

Steven Marty Grant's "Another Hotel Room"

I “met” Steven Marty Grant in the hallways of One Stop Poetry, which hosts a poetry carnival every Wednesday, and then on Twitter. I liked his poetry – and liked it a lot. So I ordered Another Hotel Room: Selected Poems 1988-2008 (no need to do a disclaimer for the FTC; no one gave it to me for review).

The volume is divided into three sections: poems from “The Road Suite” (1997) which appear mostly about Minneapolis; selected poems from 1998 to 2008; and “A Year in New York” (2007-2008). Grant currently lives and works in New York, and many of his current poems are about life in the city.

His poems are city-tough and road-warrior-conditioned, with language as gritty and rough as you’ll find in a city street . You can sense the metallic taste and smells and feel the city seep under your fingernails and work its way into your pores. You read these poems, and you know you’re never truly free of the city, and you don’t want to be.

The title poem, “Another Hotel Room,” is as urban-charged as anything I’ve read, containing both alienation and the embrace of alienation:

Four and half months on the road
and loneliness finally caught me.
Stole into my room,
sat at the foot of my bed
and shook me from a fitful sleep.
Her cold stethoscope touch
pulled what remained of my self respect
out through my chest into the night air.
When the panic wore off
I fell back to sleep at peace,
comforted that at least she
would never leave me.

Similar themes are found through the poems, whether they be about lost relationships, tourism, communication or reading the poems of Charles Bukowski. Consider this account of meeting a lost love, entitled “Pavlovian:”

It had been
six months
and the blue
in her eyes
still burned
brighter than June’s
mid-day-sky.

I had expected
the hunger
to be gone,
but when I saw her,
the bells
began to ring,
and I was
immediately
ravenous.

I longed
to satiate myself
in her arms,
to devour her,
drink in her soul
and gorge myself
on the radiance
of her smile.

But it doesn’t happen, of course; she will remain tantalizingly apart.

It is the New York poems that both reflect this urban pervasiveness and also manage to transcend it.
From the poem “Urbanality,” also the name of his blog site:

…I live in Manhattan so I haven’t seen a sunset
In three hundred & sixty five days, and birds here,
Well they’re just another pest to be controlled.
I never really liked to listen to sweet ballads
And there’s something pathetic about the blues.
I prefer the hard rocking sounds of Hindi profanity
Sung by cab drivers, the tune of droning car horns
And the distant wail of another siren’s song of ending…

In this poem, I hear Manhattan singing, I think. Grant has continued to write more “Manhattan poems” since the volume was published, and you can visit his blog and scroll down to read them. There are also two he recently posted, “Buon Compleano” and “Spanish Steps,” both about Rome, that are particularly fine.

I like Grant’s work. The poems speak from both experience and his current life in the city. He writes what he knows and what he feels, and so much of it is what any of us city-raised kids know and feel.