To learn how to love books again after my Ph.D., I started a reading notebook. For every book I read, I created a new entry that contained: 1) a word bank of words that I wouldn’t reach for on my own or that I didn’t recognize, 2) my “Notes & Quotes, Snippets & Ideas” section where I collected meaningful quotes, questions, and 3) any poem snippets/ideas that occurred during my reading. At the end of each book, I challenged myself to write a poem draft from everything I’d collected.
I didn’t read much this year, but I realized that I’d never been this engaged or inspired in my reading before. Here are small excerpts from my reading notebook, excerpts that include quotes from the works I read and even small quotes of my own notes and writing generated within these entries. In this way, I hope to provide a glimpse into how my mind works as I read, how it might lead to creation.
8/1/2023 – So to Speak by Terrance Hayes (Poetry)
Word Bank: quixotic, falsetto, jerry-rig, ambidextrous…
Quote: “To love her I had to love the night curling around me.” (Hayes, 21)
Reading Note: I’m thinking about the tongue always. Maybe it was the image of the night curling around something, but in my mind, the night becomes a pink tongue that curls around the words, the wordplay Hayes rolls out through this book like a red carpet. Or maybe a pink carpet, uncurling like a tongue too…
8/8/2023 – Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (Novel)
Word Bank: panoply, eddy, jangle, curtsy…
Quote: “She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on.” (Woolf, 7)
Reading Note: See how the semicolon works like a knife itself, how it cuts through the sentence but leaves some semblance of connective tissue? Both the moment and the character split, yet spliced together.
8/27/2023 – Plantains and Our Becoming by Melania Luisa Marte (Poetry)
Quote: “say your language is a cage. / say your language is your master, / is your monster, is your mother, / frail and tired.” (Marte, 73)
Reading Note: In these lines about language being both master, monster, and mother, I was also thinking about how that relates to predictability. Is it master/monster/mother because it shows you where it is going to go and yet you have no control over the fact that it takes you there? That you still arrive?
8/28/2023 – Oculus by Sally Wen Mao (Poetry)
Word Bank: apparition, Technicolor, monarch…
Poem Draft Snippet: You call this roleplay—how you slide up towards the headboard and pose like a monarch. The way a body’s posture can ask the right question. I slink across the room to the tune of your phone vibrating again. Your smirk is an apparition in Technicolor white…
9/5/2023 – Outside Voices, Please by Valerie Hsiung (Poetry)
Word Bank: architecture, guillotine
Quote: “If you take this book, you may think you have laid with me / If you take this book, you may think you’ve seen through me” (Hsiung, 36)
Poem Snippets:
· The architecture of my delusion?
· The black bill-fold snaps, a guillotine on my fate…
9/17/2023 – The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang (Poetry)
Quote: “Oh to be loved the way the day loves the night. See how slowly they separate?” (Chang, 49)
Reading Note: Are there “rose colored glasses” that tint everything sensual? Alluring? This book makes me want to look at the world through the eyes of a lover. I want to be in love with everything I see.
9/17/2023 – Fixer by Edgar Kunz (Poetry)
Quote: “Tried not to look / at the stain. Tried to be respectful / like a museum.” (Kunz, 28)
Reading Note: What does a museum-like respect look like when considering something personal, like the photographs tacked to my bedroom mirror? What does that slow looking reveal? The time lost in between each snapshot? Aging?
9/20/2023 – Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe (Nonfiction)
Quote: “Art is argument. Visuality is not simply looking. It is a regime of seeing and being, and any so-called neutral position is a position of power that refuses to recognize itself as such.” (Sharpe, 123)
Reading Note: No further questions, your honor.
10/4/2023 – Coal Mountain Elementary by Mark Nowak (Poetry)
Reading Note: See page 15 for the use of the em-dash as an indescribable sound; “Well, I felt this — we was setting there getting read to go around the turn. I felt this kind of —.” How can certain typographical choices represent sounds that we cannot or refuse to recreate? What does it mean for reader participation to create a space in which the reader can insert something that interrupts a sentence and potentially its meaning? What kind of trust does this require?
10/10/2023 – Have You Been Long Enough At Table by Leslie Sainz (Poetry)
Quote: “I’ve left my outline in worse / places.” (Sainz, 5)
Reading Note: Thinking about the things in childhood places on which I’ve left my “outline,” like the old rotary phone in our hallway. How it was always greasy from my little nervous hands.
Poem Snippet: My parents: arguing still on the wireless—my worry: an unendable coil hanging down…The old rotary phone was forgotten by them, but still greased with my fear.
10/14/2023 – Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson (Novel in Verse)
Quote: “How does distance look?…It extends from a spaceless / within to the edge / of what can be loved. It depends on light.” (Carson, 43)
Reading Note: Distance, light, love. For some reason, I am thinking of the cinematic moment in which someone opens the door, and the camera’s distance allows for us to see that slanted rectangle of light on the floor, and the intimate silhouette of the person inside of it. Why does that moment feel so sacred to me right now?
10/24/2023 – Blackouts by Justin Torres (Novel)
Reading Note: Fascinated by how this book lingers. I can imagine a workshop comment that might mention the “pacing” of this novel, but one of my favorite things about it is how it takes its time and in doing so, asks me to slow down in my own absorption.
Quote: “Anyway, isn’t that what mystery is? Your blackouts, these erasures? Frustration as art?” (Torres, 53)
Reading Note: The idea of “careful precision” is sticking with me, how it implies another type of precious that is reckless, unrestrained. Like chopping vegetables: how there is the precision that gets the job done correctly, and the precision that mangles the hand.
11/7/2023 – Black Pastoral by Ariana Benson (Poetry)
Reading Note: Just peeling back all the layers of fruit imagery happening in this book (pun intended), especially in “Cruel Ripenining.” Fascinated by fruit as a receptor of violence, how fruit is capable of “bruising,” has flesh like a body. Of course there is “strange fruit” as well, fruit as dead bodies. But what does the metaphor of fruit do for the body in this book, in the poems’ fields? The body as fruit seems to take on new possibilities—the body as bloom, hope, evidence of past success.
More from A Year in Reading 2023
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