Dear readers,
Not long ago, at a book party (yes, he still exists), I got into a conversation with a famous poet (he still exists). The poet said he was working on a memoir at the urging of his editor.
I'm doing great? I asked.
“Oh, I hate it!” She told me cheerfully. She was not used to writing long texts. “I want to cut every page into one paragraph and every paragraph into one line. i want to write city.”
This can be happen. Just because someone is good at one form of language doesn't mean they'll be good at another. In theory, asking a poet to write a memoir makes no more sense than asking a ballerina to play rugby. However, some dancers excelled in the scrum. Here are two.
—Greg
I'm not sure if many people read Sandberg's poetry these days. He stood too much in Whitman's shadow to cast a long shadow himself, and his folksy colloquialism and civic advocacy did not age well. But for much of his life (1878-1967), Sandberg had a legitimate claim to being America's most famous poet, more so than his friendly rival Robert Frost, even though history has crowned Frost the winner.
In addition to being a poet, Sandberg was also a newspaper columnist, children's story author, and a popular historian who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 for his biography of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Beginner readers of “Always the Young Strangers,” a memoir he wrote late in his life about growing up the son of Swedish immigrants in the western Illinois plains town of Galesburg. Unlike the slightly musty, longer version, it has a charming directness and a simplicity that highlights Sandburg's talent for the native language.
Young Sandberg's childhood has the air of American mythology. He works on a milk wagon, plays mumblepeg and corner baseball. He got into trouble while swimming in an old brick factory pond, and also struggled with the triumphalism of the book's metabolism, which constantly returns to Sandberg's hunger for learning.
He wrote early on: “He spent his boyhood in that prairie town. I received various kinds of piecemeal education without knowing that it was a part of my education. I met people at Galesburg who confused me, and later, when I read Shakespeare, I found that those people were confusing him too. I encountered a wide variety of small wonders among animals and plants that never lost their sense of wonder to me, and later I discovered that these same wonders deeply interested Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. I encountered 'Boy's Soup' as a young Spalpin, long before I read books about superstitions, folk tales and folklore. “Everything, big or small, played its part in the education I received outside of books and school.”
Read if you want: “My Antonia,” the “Great Brain” book by Horatio Alger, Woody Guthrie, and John D. Fitzgerald
Available for purchase at: Various editions from various publishers can be easily found through the usual online channels, but you may be better off stumbling upon them at a midwestern church junk sale.
“What You Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance” Carolyn Forche
Nonfiction, 2019
With five collections spanning nearly 50 years, Forché may not be the most prolific poet, but she's worth listening to whenever she has something to say. Consider her chilling poem “The Colonel,” with its unforgettable image of a military dictator lashing out. A bag of human ears is placed in front of the dinner guests.
The poem's first line provides the title of Porsche's memoir, which revisits a series of formative trips she took to El Salvador beginning in 1978, when she was 27 and the country was on the brink of civil war. Death squads roamed the land and corpses were left on the roadsides. The book opens with a two-page scene reminiscent of the “sweet and disgusting smell” of human death and the discovery of a decapitated torso with the head some distance away “without eyes or lips.” Forché concludes the scene with characteristic clarity and understatement, but the clinical precision is shocking. “Today I will learn that the human head weighs about 2.5 kg.”
Her guide on these trips was the mysterious political activist Leonel Gómez Vides. He was a coffee farmer with various reputes for working on behalf of the CIA, guerrilla groups or factions within a military dictatorship. He recruited Forché to come to El Salvador after Forché translated the works of his cousin, the poet Claribel Alegría, but his motivations for his request are not entirely clear to the reader or Forché himself. Nonetheless, that experience would shape the rest of her life.
“Listen to me.” Leonel tells her at one point. “You have to be able to see the world as it is, see how the world is structured, and be able to say what you see. And get angry.”
If there is anger at “what you heard is true,” it is simmering rather than boiling over. This is not a memoir of anger. But the book contains a dense web of threats, moral urgency, and an implicit command to pay attention.
Read if you want: Graham Greene, Roberto Bolaño, Joan Didion's 'Salvador', John Hershey's 'Hiroshima'
Available for purchase at: A good bookstore or library; It is also available as an audiobook with Forché himself as the narrator.
why…
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Count your blessings by reading poet Patricia Lockwood's delightful memoir, “Priestdaddy.” Reading an interesting memoir about her father, a married Catholic priest and teacher, whose teaching methods “included throwing chalk and keys directly at the students' heads”? It's not allowed, but back then, parents would actually call him and thank him for being harsh on the horrible sons they hated,” Lockwood admits.
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After A.O. Scott's close reading of Frank O'Hara's poem “Having a Coke With You,” learn more about O'Hara through Brad Gooch's biography and Ada Calhoun's memoir, “Also a Poet.”
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Would you like to take a look at “Sweet Theft,” an “ordinary book” of literary quotes and miscellany by poet J.D. McClatchy that’s a memoir of reading other writers?
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