The art of reading

I was having lunch with a friend today and he said that he had been in a kind of reading desert and I knew exactly what he meant. I went through something very similar myself last year and it lasted most of the summer and right into the first term of my MA. It wasn't that I wasn't trying to read poetry - I was getting book after book out of the library but I just couldn't connect with any of them, and it was the same with criticism and novels at first. At one point I began to think that maybe I was finished with poetry (quite worrying when you have just started a poetry MA!).  I finally found my way back to reading though - I started off with short stories - things like Raymond Carver and Sylvia Plath - things that people had said that my poetry reminded them of. Then I graduated to reading novels, just for the fun of it and with no pressure, and it was through reading novels that I gradually found my way back to reading poetry.


Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels had been sitting in my reading pile for ages, at least a year. I had bought it in a charity shop in Edinburgh as I had remembered that George Szirtes had listed it as a must read book in the first year of my degree course. But as is the way of it, I had bought it with good intentions but had never actually read it. Then in the first term of my MA Anne Michaels came to give a reading at UEA and I went to hear her. I was so glad I did - she was amazing, a really good reader and such beautiful (and poetic writing). I went straight home and began to read Fugitive Pieces. It is a beautiful  book, deeply descriptive, thought provoking and with deep insight into the nature of human relationships - if you have only ever seen the film I would highly recommend reading the book as it is so much better!  Anyway reading it made me want to read Anne Michaels's poetry as I thought that if she writes prose this beautifully then her poetry must be amazing, and I was right she has a very sensual and physical style of writing (I have written about this before) and it rekindled my love for poetry.

Anne Michaels and the ecriture feminine

I find myself coming back again to the ideas of ecriture feminine. Although I am not convinced that language functions merely as an instrument of patriarchal expression, I do see some strong elements of what Cixous describes as feminine writing in the writers that I am currently attracted to.

"Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the inpregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse..." (Cixous, H. The Laugh of the Medusa)

Cixous and Irigarary do not accept the very Western idea of a separation between mind and body - the mind being traditionally male, the body female. They are not saying that only women can write in this new, freer more physical language but that this is a more feminine way of writing.

I am currently reading a book of poetry called The Weight of Oranges by Anne Michaels - Michaels is a Canadian writer who started out as a poet but now writes mostly fiction. Her poetry is very sensual and to me embodies exactly the way of writing that Cixous is describing.

"By morning the stones we'd found
were dull with air,

but I couldn't forget the smell

of the trees' intimate darkness,

the scattered sound of the rain's distracted hands,

husks of buds in green pools on the sidewalks."

(from "Turning Twenty-Three" in Michaels, Anne, The Weight of Oranges)

Keeping the World Alive

"If, by accident, a moment were to occur when everyone was asleep, the world would disappear." writes Anne Michaels in her beautifully haunting novel Fugitive Pieces. I found in this statement a profound resonance and somehow I find that I want believe it more than science, astronomy and any other theory about the world and time and space. I find myself wondering if that is why the earth turns, why only half of the planet, at any given time, is in the light. Is it so that when we are sleeping, dreaming our dreams of the dead, the past and the not yet real - somewhere, on the other side of the world people are going about their daily business and, although they may not know it, keeping the planet alive?