Reader's diary …

There has been a lot of back-and-forth lately about the nature of book reviews and their chances for survival. This usually has to do, though,with the book review as shaped by newspapers and magazines. Such reviews have obviously survived online, but the Internet also makes it possible to go about reviewing books in other ways as well. There are, for instance, already plenty examples of readers' diaries, accounts of reading as the reading takes place.

This seems to me a very useful approach, especially when it comes to poetry (and also collections of short fiction or essays). A particular poem or short story may well warrant the space allotted to review an entire novel (think "Little Gidding" or "Death in Venice").

I have lately been reading three books of poetry – Lynn Levin's Miss Plastique, Miriam Kotzin's The Body's Bride, and Diane Sahms-Guarnieri's Images of Beauty. That's how I like to read poetry when I don't have to review it, just browsing around in this volume or that. That I'm a guy and they're all gals makes it even more interesting.  I'm also acquainted with all three.  

Anyway, I've been thinking of posting here the thoughts and observations that occur to me as I read these books, as a kind of inaugural reader's diary feature for the blog. I intend the posts to mirror the reading so I'll be skipping around from book to book. I probably won't post daily, but posts will be frequent enough. 

I'm going to confine this first post to Miss Plastique. Recently, Lynn and I had an email exchange during the course of which she referred to her collection as "very girly." That it is and that makes it all the more intriguing to a guy.  If John Stuart Mill was right, and the difference between eloquence and poetry is that the former is heard while the latter is overheard, then this s the poetry you might overhear in the powder room,or someplace else where men are unlikely to intrude.

The first poem that caught my eye as I paged through the book was "Dippity-Do." I remembered the TV ad from the '60s. I don't think I ever knew what the stuff was for. I just remembered its name being chanted over and over. But to a young girl at the time, wanting to look her best, and be stylish, it could come in useful:

I hated my hair and wished it were straight

so that I could wear it

In a swing or the London Look.

I wanted my hair to be smooth

so the popular girls

would talk to me at school.

I helped raise three girls, so I have some idea of where the poem's speaker is coming from. But the poem then takes a surprising and unsettling turn:

Also wished my father

didn't get mad almost every night.

Once he knocked

all the rollers from my head.

This prompts the speaker to give up the Dippity-Do: "After that, I let my hair go free." And that turns out to be a good thing:

The straight kids thought I was a head.

You look just like Janis Joplin, the hippies said.

And, hey, that was good enough for me.

There's a lot of drama and heartbreak packed into this poem's 19 lines: teen angst, domestic violence, the yearning for acceptance. As for the Dippity-Do, it's the perfect pop culture reference, the kind Frank O'Hara liked to employ, a reminder that poetry can be found in the oddest places.