The lovely, delectable, and intrinsically stylish Lauren Cerand of Lux Lotus offers her views on poetry & mentions some great poets and new books (books! new books!) I cannot wait to check out. She also makes the first stab at what I had hoped this week would be all about -- making the connection between poetry and the world we're living in at this very moment:
It's rather cosmic that you asked me about poetry because it's a subject that I've been thinking about a lot lately. Whenever I'm feeling busiest in my day-to-day life as an arts publicist, I often find myself turning to the compact intensity of a poem during the brief moments I have to read for pleasure before bed or in transit.
Not too long ago, I found myself carving out a new identity following the demise of a long-term relationship that defined most of my twenties... perhaps this explains my awakened interest in the sort of furtive, grasping love that poets seem to capture so eloquently!
The Stray Dog Cabaret, recently published by NYRB Classics, is my idea of a perfect volume of poetry. Loosely gathering work by poets active just before the Russian Revolution, it conjures a sense of place in the reader's mind that is at once enchanting, doomed and austere. It's hard to imagine while we're young that long after we're gone the only image that might remain, if any, is of a shawl slipping from a lover's shoulders; that truth and beauty fade. And yet, it is what it is, unabashedly ephemeral and ever more wondrous for ever having existed at all.
Other stand-alone poems I've been returning to repeatedly lately, all classics: "The Young Fools" (Les Ingénus) by Paul Verlaine, "Dear Miss Emily" by James Galvin and "The Métier of Blossoming" by Denise Levertov. In a more contemporary vein, I love "Deer Quake" by Aase Berg and Robert Baker's "your limbs are like the cranes, my little fascist" the latter of which Michelle Lin of New York Brain Terrain turned me on to not long ago.
It would seem that my love of all things poetic has even crept into my professional life, given two of the books that I'm publicizing at the moment: David Breskin's Supermodel, an epic poem that tells the story of an archetypical supermodel in one sentence, interspersed with found text from the Internet (Soft Skull Press), and Gayle Brandeis' Self Storage, a novel about a woman whose habit of buying and reselling storage unit contents sets her on a path of self-discovery inspired by Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. While very different in many respects, both books are extremely culturally relevant and firmly place poetry in its most resonant context: commenting on the world around us, right now. I am grateful for it.
Lauren Cerand writes about art, politics and style, broadly defined, at LuxLotus.com.
