Cane (New Edition)

Last year my mother died. Often, my habit and love for reading felt unbearable and foreign. Other weeks it was reading alone that comforted me. It was all I wanted to do, all I was capable of doing, because all I wanted was to live inside of sentences, stanzas, stories. I didn't and couldn't go out there, the world was glaring in its surface of sameness, but books were ultimately part of the company that drew me out of a space that was dangerous, expanding in its withdrawal and silence. In 2015, I also had a book of my own published. And, honestly, it was difficult to navigate a space that suddenly felt inarticulate to me. Kind friends and kind strangers alike sent me specific titles regarding grief. I also consumed books where grief, loss, rebirth, and death were implicit, distilled, expanded into unbelievable landscapes I hadn't seen or understood as clearly before, in the surreal afterlife of my mother's absence. One of the best books I read last year and have returned to more than once is Elizabeth Alexander's The Light of the World. The book left me speechless in its love, grace, and dignity. Reading that book gave me hope that I too could survive and celebrate life itself. Alexander's book gave me hope and I picked up Tracy K. Smith's Ordinary Light and Lacy M. Johnson's The Other Side. I also returned to Toi Derricotte's The Undertaker's Daughter. Being on the road on tour for my own book, I often filled my suitcase with more books than clothing. Everything I wore was mostly black so I didn't think or care about clothes at all. But I cared about books and knew there were certain books I needed to have with me should I wake up, inconsolable, in a hotel room on the other side of the country. And so, many books crossed state lines, their spines shifting in mile-high altitudes and time zones. I wrangled slim volumes of poetry into my camera bag, which was stuffed with lenses, notebooks, and a watercolor set. I began thinking of books and geography, literally and psychically. I considered how landscapes affected my mood and how, of course, a voracious grief devoured everything. Sometimes I'd get frustrated because I couldn't remember names of favorites characters or the way those characters in those books had once made me feel, so I'd go back and reread them. And, in my travels, I often looked out for marvelous independent bookstores where I would then pick up more books, often shipping them back to Brooklyn when I realized I'd be charged at the airport for being over the weight restrictions. While working on a photography project in Oxford, Miss., last summer I reread William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Eudora Welty's On Writing. I'd also carried around Lucille Clifton's Collected Poems, edited by Kevin Young, because I was working on photographs about black women's bodies, identities, and the presence and interruption of landscape in terms of blackness. This journey made me pick up a second or third copy of Roger Reeves's King Me because I ended up driving down to Money, Miss., and further into the Delta. King Me made me go searching for Jean Toomer's Cane and Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road. Hurston's grace and excellence sent me back, gratefully, into the words of Henry Dumas, Langston Hughes, and Robert Hayden. While I was in Portland, I caught up with Matthew Dickman but was so shy about meeting him I forgot to ask him to sign the hardcover of Mayakovsky's Revolver I'd stashed in my rental car. And when I traveled down to Santa Fe to teach at IAIA (Institute of American Indian Arts), I dove again into Sherwin Bitsui's Flood Song and read Jessica Jacobs's Pelvis with Distance because I was in Georgia O'Keeffe country. I'm still working through O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz's letters, My Faraway One, and made some serious dents in it this year. I've opened up Vladimir Nabokov's Letters to Véra and placed those two near each other, like constellations, in my reading stack. Speaking of women artists, I reread the Diary of Frida Kahlo and Hayden Herrera's biography of Frida Kahlo because I curated the Poetry Society of America's Poetry Walk for the New York Botanical Garden's astonishing exhibition "Frida Kahlo: Art Garden Life." Lucky for me, I got to spend lots and lots of time with the poetry of Octavio Paz, one of my favorites! A dear friend just sent me a copy of Larry Levis’s The Darkening Trapeze. Literally, I've been hiding out in my house to devour it in one sitting, which obviously led to a second sitting so I could read the entire book aloud. But I had to leave my house eventually, so Levis has been riding the subways with me. We're great company for each other. Reading Levis, of course, made me pick up Philip Levine’s What Work Is again and that somehow made me pull out W.S. Merwin, Mark Strand, and Jack Gilbert. When I journeyed to Vermont for the Brattleboro Festival, I cried at a moving tribute for Galway Kinnell and that made me buy another copy of The Book of Nightmares, which made me stay up all night in my hotel room reading aloud, remembering once how I'd been fortunate enough to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge with Kinnell and so many other poets like Cornelius Eady and Marilyn Nelson and Martín Espada. And I think it was over 90 degrees out and Bill Murray walked across that day with us too.  Anyway, Kinnell pushed me toward Seamus Heaney and Czesław Miłosz. Throw in Tomas Tranströmer and Amiri Baraka's SOS: 1961 - 2013, and somehow eventually I'm holding Federico García Lorca, who is always near, and whose words also travel with me on trains, planes, and dreams. When I read poetry I’ll sometimes take down several poets who may or may not be speaking clearly to one another in some tone or mood or style. It helps me hear each of them even more clearly. Finally, I think, if there’s time, the last two things I hope to read (again) before 2016 arrives will be Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and the letters of Vincent Van Gogh. As I sit here looking at the bookshelves crammed with new books, I simply sigh in joy and think, too, of the stacks of books at my visual art studio nearby. This year I'm a reader for something for PEN, which means in the last months I've read over 50 books by writers of color, including poetry, fiction, and non fiction. Thinking just of that list alone, there are far too many books this year for me to include here. How wonderful! We're all better for it! So, here, quickly, are some more titles, both old and new, that changed me, whether by their grief, their beauty, their joy, their violence, their ambition, their desire, their imagination, their history, or future, but always, by their truth and courage: Ross Gay, Unabashed Catalogues of Gratitude Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn; Lighthead Patrick Phillips, Elegy for a Broken Machine Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus Jack Gilbert, Collected Carl Phillips, Reconnaissance Nicholas Wong, Crevasse Vievee Francis, Forest Primeval Kyle Dargan, Honest Engine Nick Flynn, My Feelings Tonya M. Foster, A Swarm of Bees in High Court Rickey Laurentiis, Boy with Thorn Jonathan Moody, Olympic Butter Gold Margo Jefferson, Negroland Chris Abani, Song for Night Rick Barot, Chord Major Jackson, Roll Deep Yesenia Montilla, The Pink Box Randall Horton, Hook Parneshia Jones, Vessel Ellen Hagan, Hemisphere Yusef Komunyakaa, The Emperor of Water Clocks Audrey Niffenegger, Raven Girl Michael Klein, When I Was a Twin Patti Smith, M Train Marie Cardinal, The Words to Say It Dawn Lundy Martin, Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life Michel Archimbaud, Francis Bacon: In Conversation with Michel Archimbaud Paul Beatty, The Sellout Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping; Lila Chinelo Okparanta, Under the Udala Trees Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite, War of the Encyclopaedists Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer Marie Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye Herta Müller, The Hunger Angel Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill Helen Macdonald, H Is for Hawk Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists More from A Year in Reading 2015 Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews Like what you see? 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1. I began 2015 with my then-girlfriend, now fiancée, and two other couples, at a rented house in the Catskills. The house belonged to a college art professor -- Bard, I think -- and on every available wall of the place hung some darkly priapic piece of art. There was a small, cold artist’s studio in the backyard where Renée and I were supposed to sleep, but after discovering a bundle of dreadlocked human hair, strung invisibly from the ceiling, and a series of circular collages that can only be described as psychosexually insane (or insanely psychosexual?), we opted for the narrow futon in the main house, near the dry heat of the hearth. We cooked every night, drank a survey of Caribbean sugar cane -- Appleton, Barbancourt, Brugal -- went hiking through the crater lakes at Minnewaska, talked and sometimes argued about music, art, magazines. Renée made a playlist I still sometimes listen to when I’m pretending to write, and as we counted down the seconds to the new year, we formed a little crooked circle and danced and sang. During quiet times, I read poems: Richard Wright’s Haiku, and the Robert Frost collection I always throw into my backpack when I leave the city. This was the beginning of a halting, yearlong attempt to read more poetry. I finally caught up with people like Morgan Parker and Phillip B. Williams, revisited Langston Hughes (and dug into his enigmatic, newly released Selected Letters) and Gwendolyn Brooks and Kevin Young, consulted with the back-pocket edition of Pablo Neruda I used to carry around as an annoying undergraduate, and -- speaking of haiku -- tried, again and again, all year, to figure out the effectiveness and easy grace of Matsuo Bashō's frog, slipping into the water with a immortal plop. No luck there. I have been trying to understand pastoralism -- I hit 30 and everything suddenly seems so loud -- and so have been working my way, slowly, through a slim Dover Thrift anthology of English Romantic Poetry. (Has anybody, by the way, published a big takedown of the Dover people? What they do -- I’m sometimes very cheap, it seems right to mention -- seems too good to be morally right.) They’ve all got their merits, but let’s be honest: the whole movement was John Keats and the Pips. I reread Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at some point (Dover again! Please tell me this is okay to do), and her prose, and imagination, blows all her husband’s friends’ verse out of the water. Speaking of publishers, I -- like everybody else, maybe -- was wowed, and often tutored, by this year’s offerings from NYRB books. Eileen Chang’s Naked Earth helped me to understand the logic and language of Mao’s China; Linda Rosenkrantz’s unruly, addictive Talk drew me closer to Andy Warhol’s drug-and-Freud-fueled New York than I’d ever, at least consciously, wanted to venture. I can’t remember the last time I laughed at a book the way I laughed at Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. Or the last time I felt as trustful of the control and restraint and taste of a novelist as I did with Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House. Or as happy to be crawling through the oeuvre of a favorite playwright as with Eugene O’Neill’s Seven Plays of the Sea. I found a first-edition, hard-copy of the O’Neill on one of the uncountable book-lousy folding tables you’ll find, any Sunday of the year, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. These tables, and their attendant “book guys,” are a good reason, if you need one, to live in New York. On another day -- summer, sun-stunned -- after, I’m just now remembering, a long weekend meal with those same couples from the Catskills, I stopped by a book table and picked up Michael Beckerman’s impressive New Worlds of Dvorak, a close reading -- journalistic and musicological at turns -- of the great composer’s years spent in America, trying to bequeath to us the “national music” we kind of already had. I cherish Saul Bellow, so I started but am hesitant to finish his newly collected nonfiction, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About. I cherish Flannery O’Connor, so I read a few more of her beautiful, chastening letters and left her alone. I cherish Ralph Ellison -- third big cliche in a row, I know -- so I read Arnold Rampersad’s magisterial, appropriately tragicomic biography -- very late to that particular party, I know -- and went sprinting back to the essays in Going to the Territory and Shadow and Act. Speaking of cherished writers and unfashionable lateness, I finally picked up my copy of Mansfield Park (Dover!!!) and wished I’d read it 10 years earlier, for all sorts of real-life reasons. I finally read Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, and felt the same way. I read Hilton Als’s White Girls and felt awkward about the looks I got on the subway. (The dynamics of reading on the subway are another essay entirely.) And speaking of taking things slowly, for fear of ever catching up, I read the second of the Karl Ove Knausgaard novels and called it a year. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s haunting, world-beating Between the World and Me led me back -- inevitably -- to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Those aforementioned Hughes letters led me back to the Harlem Renaissance -- and specifically, for some reason, back to the so-called “passers:” Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun; Nella Larsen’s odd, twitchy Quicksand; Jean Toomer’s Cane, an insane, beautiful blend of verse, prose, and drama. Cane’s is probably still my favorite book, and reading it again made me want to someday try to write a life of Toomer, who seems to have been America’s most interesting psychopath as well as its most tragically unrealized and overlooked modernist. (The Fauset, the Larsen, and the Toomer are collected in the Library of America’s beautiful boxed set of Harlem Renaissance Novels.) At some point Renée and I began reading Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex -- which she’s already read, and I have not -- aloud, in bed, at night, sort of inconsistently. It’s wonderful so far. As always, I ended up feeling like I should’ve been able to read a lot more. 2. Maybe it makes sense to share, before leaving this exercise alone, that this has been one of the more emotionally intense years of my life. I’ve been introduced to entirely new, often overwhelming species of joy and anxiety and fulfillment and fear and hope. There were times of ridiculous, almost uncomfortable happiness; other days (weeks, months) I spent wishing for a side exit. With these extremes came a change in my reading. For the first time since I was a kid, I found myself reading almost desperately, reading as a purposeful means of escape. I guess I’d forgotten (likely during the slow and misguided process of becoming a writer) how effective and merciful an analgesic it can be to leave your own imagination and pick up somebody else’s. Reading has always been my favorite thing to do. This year it was sometimes the only thing I could do. I felt more grateful for books, and for writers -- because I remembered that I need them -- than I’d been in a very long time. More from A Year in Reading 2015 Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.