Reader's diary — The sustenance of counterpoint …

These reader's diary entries that I have been posting from time to time are not meant to amount to any sort of grand criticism. They are simply a record of what runs through my mind while reading one thing or another. A review is hardly the only way to write about a book. It is certainly not the best way. Like people, books deserve better than to be weighed in the balance like produce.

It is impossible, of course, if you are reading a book for review, not to have the thought of that lurking in your mind as you read. It is a distraction that can distort. But it does get you thinking about what you're reading as you read it. The resulting pauses and ponderings are often quite interesting, but are unlikely to figure in any review except indirectly.

The pauses and ponderings that take place while reading a book for review are different from those you have while reading for recreation. Both are worth noting, because they may be insightful — often in quite different ways— and so enrich one's understanding of the book, but also because, over time, they reveal patterns of response in oneself. One learns a lot about oneself from discovering how one reads.

I have recently been pausing and pondering over a suite of poems in Miriam Kotzin's The Body's Bride. The first poem, "How to Write a Sustainable Poem," serves as a kind of overture. It is followed by four others that address love, feminism, and protest in terms of poetic sustainability.

In the first poem, the third and fourth lines of the first stanza — "but scandalize the bourgeoisie / with your naughty thoughts implied" — become the first and second lines of the second stanza; the third and fourth lines of the second stanza—"by clever phallic imagery / (pines and windmills) you've denied" — in turn become the first lines of the third stanza, and the second and third lines of the third stanza — "all hope of passing for PC. / What you've dreamt you've pushed aside?" — become the opening lines of the final stanza. The fifth and sixth lines of each stanza are identical, positing metaphor and simile as Jekyll and Hyde. Each stanza has six lines that rhyme a b a b a b.

This sets and sustains in motion a lacy counterpoint of sound and sense. The first six of the lines quoted and the other two lines relate to each other very much the way subject and countersubject do in a fugue. The baroque suite was an arrangement of dances, and this suite of poems — three are sonnets — very much brings to mind the wit and grace of the baroque. A refreshing take on our pedestrian era, to say the least. Some reading club should schedule a night to have just these five poems as the topic of the evening's conversation. Just a consideration of the permutations implicit in the use of the term sustainable could take some time. Is a sustainable love poem one about sustainable love or it just a sustainable poem about love? You can see how interlocked it all is. And don't get me started on whether something that was dreamt was pushed aside or whether the pushing aside is what was dreamt.