It’s been a wonderful Bookman birthday day today. The cake came out so good and it couldn’t have been simpler. It is basically a single-layer chocolate cake with some cherries in it topped with a can of cherry pie filling and then drizzled with chocolate. What could be easier? And because of the cherries we can pretend that it is nutritious!

I began reading My Poets by Maureen McLane today and very quickly became friends with this book.

The first chapter is short and is a “Proem in the form of a Q&A” Here is a sample:

Why do you read poetry?
I caught this morning morning’s minion.

Why do you read poetry?
Batter my heart.

Why to you read poetry?
I have wasted my life.

Other questions include what is the first poem you remember, why poetry, and why do you write poetry? Here are a couple answers to the last question:

Why do you write poetry?
My purpose here is to advance into
the sense of the weather.

Why do you write poetry?
I sing to use the Waiting.

As if that weren’t marvelous enough, chapter two muses about the word “kankedort” which apparently only appears in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. From there we move to a chapter called “My Impasses” in which McLane talks about two poetry classes she took as a college freshman in 1985, one of them taught by Helen Vendler. She talks about reading poetry and reading poetry, good readings and bad readings, about finding a way into a poem and being stuck on the outside even though you badly want to understand. And she talks about how, years later, a poem that was so confusing and impossible originally can suddenly open up and let you in and mean so much. It is a really wonderful chapter that I might have to reread and write about because she says so much that is true.

And then chapter four. Oh, I had to stop myself in the middle of it so I wouldn’t rush to the end because it is so utterly fun. Chapter four is called “My Elizabeth Bishop / (My Gertrude Stein)” and it is written in the style of Stein. For her undergraduate thesis McLane decided she was going to write about Stein but Stein resisted her and a gift from a mentor of a book of Elizabeth Bishop poems turned out to be a wonderful discovery and saved her thesis from disaster. I must give you a taste of the chapter so here is how it begins:

My Elizabeth Bishop begins with Gertrude Stein.
This is not usual.
Bishop is unusual but not in the way Stein is unusual.
I was not used to Gertrude Stein and found I could not get used
    to Stein though I tried.
I was struggling to find a topic for my undergraduate thesis.
This seemed the most important thing in the world.
Whatever is the world to you is the most important thing to
    you.
I would be making myself in this thing.
I was always making myself or being made.
This was unavoidable.
I was planning on being made by Gertrude Stein but she was not
    cooperating.
She was operating on another plane a fractured cubist grid I
    could not make out.

And it appears to go on like this for entire 27 pages of the chapter.

I suppose this kind of book might not be for everyone, but oh, I have a little crush on it at the moment and hope that we manage to be best friends by the final page.