Book Review: SELECTED POEMS, by Conrad Aiken

College sort of killed poetry for me. I knew eventually I'd regain interest, though probably not in the moody contemporary stuff my professors so loved; it took a friend of mine assuring me that Conrad Aiken was the perfect solution to my problem before I began to come around. He said this while hauling a stack of Aiken books up from his basement and proceeding to thumb madly through them in a search for "the perfect poem" to win me over, and though he didn't find that Perfect One, he read me enough to make me purchase my very own copy of SELECTED POEMS and continue the search on my own. I found it in "The Biography of Senlin," specifically II:1, the last stanza of which reads:

Knock on the door,--and you shall have an answer.
Open the heavy walls to set me free,
And blow a horn to call me into the sunlight,--
And startled, then, what a strange thing you shall see!
Nuns, murderers, and drunkards, saints and sinners,
Lover and dancing girl and sage and clown
Will laugh upon you, and you will find me nowhere.
I am a room, a house, a street, a town.

Moody, yes, but gorgeous--I encountered this one over my lunch break at work and was stunned, particularly by the last line. That was the Perfect One, indeed.

And I'll tell you what--the rest of the collection was just as lovely, dark and abysmal, but teeming with beautiful language, so that I remembered, however dimly, that that's what I liked about poetry in the first place: the language.

RATING: 4
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An interesting aside: I think I read somewhere that Joan Aiken, of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase was Conrad Aiken's daughter. Even if she isn't, you should still read her books. You should also read my review of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.

Joan Aiken: The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (The Little Bird review)

Walter Rinder would be proud

As you may or may not know, my dad and I collect bad poetry (for an entry on our love of crappy literature, click here). With that in mind, and the fact that Walter Rinder is the quintessential Bad Poet, I present you with an email my dad just sent me:

At the hospital [where he works] we celebrate a strange, committee ritual in which
someone reads a "Reflection" as the first agenda item. It's usually a
bit of Chicken Soup for the Soul tripe and at consummation, most
listeners add yet another arrow to their quivers of enlightenment,
while a sorry few sit in stunned silence. Here's the Rinderesque poem
read by a long-haired woman at yesterday's reflection:

Wage Peace
by Judyth Hill, September 11, 2001

Wage Peace with your breath.

Breathe in firemen and rubble.
Breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red-wing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists
Breathe out sleeping children and fresh mown fields.

Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.

Breathe in the fallen and breathe out life long relationships intact.

Wage peace with our listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.

Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothing pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.

Play music; learn the word "thank you" in 3 languages.

Learn to knit: make a hat.

Think of chaos as dancing raspberries.

Imagine grief
as the outbreak of beauty or gesture of fish.

Swim for the other side.

Wage peace.

Never has the word seemed so fresh and precious.

Have a cup of tea and rejoice.

Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.

Some applauded. I needed to blow my nose.

See? I come by it honestly.

Ornithological dejecta

My dad and I have this thing about bad books. Not merely "a complete waste of time" bad, or even "why, God, oh why?", but bad--so bad they're almost good. And while we've exchanged several books of bad poetry over the years, the pursuit of the very worst books didn't get competitive until last Father's Day, when I gave Dad a copy of Why Cats Paint.

I can't even explain the badness of this book and do it justice, so thank God for the website.

I send you forth with the chilling words, "They're serious."

So, we went out to breakfast at Old Town on Father's Day, and found ourselves seated not two booths away from another Father's Day hoopla--a dad, a mom and three kids, and dammit all if the dad wasn't wearing a crown with "World's Best Dad" across the front in embossed letters. Show off.

"I want a crown," Dad pouted as we sat down.

Before long, however, we stole the spotlight as the craziest folks in Old Town when Why Cats Paint made its way out of the gift bag--laughing like mad as we read passages aloud, passing the book back and forth over our coffee cups and breakfast plates, both of us crying and pink in the cheeks. In the absence of the actual book, I give you this quote from the website:

The work shown here was completed in 15 minutes on bathroom wallpaper by Monty, a Persian belonging to Mrs. Nora Scrotes of Chicago.

Mrs. Scrotes feels sure that the work was directly influenced by Monty being washed and having his knots removed the day before. Not only does Monty find the experience unpleasant, but on this occasion Mrs. Scrotes had to take an extended call from her elderly mother when she was halfway through the final rinse and was therefore unable to restrain the cat from attempting to dry itself by rolling in its litter tray.

We learned, to our dismay, that there are honest-to-God "feline art critics." And to make matters far worse (or better? I can never really be sure), while perusing The Museum of Non-Primate Art website, I found this.