Grace Notes @ Snarkattack

For those of you who might not know, John Hollander is a contemporary American poet. As well as having a lot of poetry published, he also writes about poetry, and I found out about this particular title in the bibliography to another book about poetry and poetic form.

It’s very well done and not at all boring - Hollander writes in verse constantly to try and explain/illustrate the concepts he’s discussing so it ends up being very amusing, entertaining as well as highly informative. There are also examples of others’ work quoted, as well as his own.

I honestly had no idea there were so many different forms of poetry, I’ll bet there are way more than is discussed in this slim volume but it’s an excellent starting point if you want to discover the main ones and how they work. Be warned, it’s also a lot of information crammed into a small book! But I know I’ll be using it as a reference text from this point on.

Today is a good day, probably because I made it out of the house to do some volunteer work and got to type up some poems for the magazine I help out with. This selection didn’t grab me as much as the last batch I typed up, despite the fact that . Next week I get to help out with the magazine layout, which is most exciting. Totally my dream job, and there is no hint of sarcasm in that statement, I swear!

The person for whom I volunteer very, very kindly reads poems of mine that I bring in. Today I had a handful, only one of which didn’t quite make the grade. My ‘Date night’ poem he seemed to like a fair bit (it’s in a password-protected post here, so some of my pals that read this will have read that one), as well as my ‘Interregnum’ - which I actually wrote in the fabled place of convalescence. God, I love euphemisms. It seems my poem ‘Interregnum’ which is about medications and the like (the title is supposed to hint at the mind not having a ‘reigning monarch’ ie. not having one’s full mental faculties. Very George III, eh?) has been received very well by a couple of poet-type persons and this pleases me greatly! Besides, it’s wonderful to get fab feedback on one’s hard work!

Other things seem to finally have hit me - I tend to be a bit retarded in that I react in a most delayed fashion to all sorts of news. My track record with upsetting or traumatic events is just appalling - it can take me years to sometimes fully ‘deal’ with events. There are some people that no matter how I try to explain this to, just won’t get it and think I’m simply not trying hard enough to get better. I find those people frustrate and sadden me.

It seemed like that was going to happen with my brother’s good news - but after him taking my mother and I to where him and his girlfriend have bought a piece of land, and taking us on a tour of what house will be built on it, finally excitement has hit me and everyone in my house is full of good cheer for my brother. On Thursday, he will be proposing to his girlfriend of a year and a half to the day so looks like I have me a sister-in-law-to-be. I think I’m finally adjusting to the fact that we’re going to have more family…it’s going to be a bit odd, given that when we moved to Australia we had no one. Well, we still do, all my immediate family have…is each other. No wonder we’re so fecking dysfunctional.

So family-wise, things are actually going well and the only thing getting me through this week is dinner with Rob and Dave tomorrow evening (yippee!!!) and the fact that my brother will soon have a fiancée. His life is truly moving forward. Apparently, I’m going to be a bridesmaid at the wedding (zoinks!). I’ve informed my brother that I want my bridesmaid’s dress to have a condom-sized pocket sewn into the seam. He told me I’m randy. Well, duh - not only am I a budding poet but a depressive - we’re totally obsessed with sex and death, sex and death…is there any other way to be?

So I’m still feeling like crap not really able to do too much about it…except…take a bath. I should have done it sooner! I’m such an idiot! What I’d like to know is what is it that is so wonderful about throwing oneself into a tub of gloriously warm water? Would Freud have something to say about it, does it signal our wanting to return to the womb or something? Who knows.

Taking a bath - if you’re going to do it, you have to do it properly. You can’t do it half-arsed, or at least I don’t think you should. Should go all-out. I chuck in some things to make the bath bubble like mad and also bath melty-type things that make the water soft and encase the body in beautiful oils that also soften and scent. A body scrub is a must - something like a salt scrub to get rid of all the dead skin on your body, making you extremely silky to the touch. Use a loofah when scrubbing up with your choice of shower gel (or soap, I tend not to use soaps as they seem to be more drying on my skin).

Ah then afterwards, slather yourself with a rich, scented body cream and I swear you will feel like you have baby’s skin. Maybe not quite so delicate but as soft!

Right now, I’m sitting in front of the computer (still waiting for those damned World of Warcraft updates to install), with a blue-grey face mask, waiting for it to dry and do its thing. God I feel so much better! Hopefully ready to kick some serious World-of-Warcraft arse…

If you feel so inclined, you can also take drinks into the bath with you. I just had a cup of tea but usually I prefer alcoholic drinks - chocolate soy milk with Kahlua (and gosh, lots of it, you hear?), pink grapefruit juice with Campari (gustatory bliss!), or Baileys on ice (simple, but still luverly).

I can tell you I was a far cry from Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady screaming “Ah’m a good girl I am!” when they shove her in the bath as she begins her Pygmalionesque transformation. Throw me in, I tell you, throw me in! Why did people back then have such an aversion to bathing? I’m thinking of Louis the Sun King and how they basically had to beg to get him into water for his annual bath, ugh.

I love baths, can you guess? Gosh, they are so deliriously therapeutic too.

I might be useless and depressed at the moment but at least I’m finishing up some books. I didn’t enjoy this volume of Japanese love poetry as much as I thought I would - a great surprise given that I quite like Japanese literature. This book contains selections from the Manyōshū which I believe is another great work of ancient Japanese literature and the poems are not all romantic love poems but also express love for one’s parents, siblings, country, mountains even. The Japanese are often known as being extremely appreciative of nature. A lot of these do discuss nature even when referring to the objects of their desire.

The most unusual line I read was in the last few pages of the book and is as follows:

Her tresses black as a mud-snail’s bowels…

(p. 102)

Not exactly the most romantic line I’ve ever come across in my life…you wouldn’t catch me writing that sort of thing to my loved one that is for certain!

Two I did like are as follows:

(by Taniha Ōme, a young woman)

Here where the wild ducks
Sport in the pond,
The leaves fall from the trees
And float - but no floating heart
Have I who love you true.

***

I will not comb my morning hair:
Your loving arm, my pillow,
Has lain under it.

The second one I do adore, as it’s a very touching image. Please note the formatting isn’t exact but I can’t get it to appear as it does in the text.

I have read translations of Japanese poetry and liked it immensely. I think this would be a good introduction if you’ve never read any such poetry before.

It’s been a rainy, stormy Melbourne day (thank goodness, we really need the rain!) and I woke up not feeling particularly crash-hot. What the hell is wrong with my mood I can’t tell, maybe it’s premenstrual crap or something. A new pair of jeans I bought arrived as well as my mother’s Avon order for the current campaign (which, lucky me, I get to pack, being her slave labour! hee hee) so that forced me out of my pyjamas.

But most notably, I pulled out a book I’m meant to be reviewing for Blogcritics and actually wrote some of my review. Yippee! It’s still not quite finished I seem to have writers’ block when it comes to saying certain things, but it’s almost finished.

I know things could be worse (please spare a thought for my dear friend whose father just passed away), or I could be wearing a plastic collar like my cat still is. I wish I could be fitter, happier, more productive, like the song…

Wow, this book is amazing. I’d read the first part of Art Spiegelman’s Maus a long while ago and recently found myself stranded in a chain bookstore for a few hours so decided to read the second part of this incredibly sad graphic novel. Maybe I was feeling down or something but it almost had me spill a tear or two in public, just to give you an idea of just how depressing it is.

Maus is an account of the graphic novel author’s father’s experiences in Auschwitz, a Polish Jewish man, and one of the most notable things about it is that the Jewish people are characterised as mice, the Nazis are cats, non-Jewish Polish are pigs and so on. It’s a pretty horrific read though at times is funny, tender but always disturbing. It’s the sort of thing that makes one wonder how on earth other human beings can be so horrendously cruel to one another.

It’s absolutely worth reading if you can manage it, though you might not want to read it if you’re feeling down to begin with. The illustrations are absolutely fantastic and grainy in that ink-pen kind of way. It’s also a terribly clever book and gives a glimpse into the life of a Holocaust survivor and just how much of a continued trauma existence afterwards is.