“Oh! there are spirits of the air,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley. In this stunningly original book Maureen N. McLane channels the spirits and voices that make up the music in one poet’s mind. Weaving criticism and memoir, My Poetsexplores a life reading and a life read. McLane invokes in My Poets not necessarily the best poets, nor the most important poets (whoever these might be), but those writers who, in possessing her, made her. “I am marking here what most marked me,” she writes. Ranging from Chaucer to H.D. to William Carlos Williams to Louise Glück to Shelley (among others), McLane tracks the “growth of a poet’s mind,” as Wordsworth put it in The Prelude.
In a poetical prose both probing and incantatory, McLane has written a radical book of experimental criticism. Susan Sontag called for an “erotics of interpretation”: this is it. Part Bildung, part dithyramb, part exegesis, My Poets extends an implicit invitation to you, dear reader, to consider who your “my poets,” or “my novelists,” or “my filmmakers,” or “my pop stars,” might be.
About Maureen N. McLane
Maureen N. McLane is the author of two collections of poetry, Same Life (FSG, 2008) and World Enough (FSG, 2010).
Editorial Review
Using her skills as a poet and critic, McLane (English/New York Univ.; World Enough: Poems, 2010, etc.) examines the major poets of her life and the inspiration and technique she drew from each. There’s Elizabeth Bishop, “a sea to breathe in once the gills you needed grew and breathing grew less strange.” From William Carlos Williams she learned to draw from her own pure and crazy American experience. She dissects Marianne Moore’s poem “Marriage” at length, weighing it against her own failed marriage and subsequent same-sex relationship. She identifies with H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), the closeted lesbian, and finds that her poem “Oread” “bespeaks our desire to commune, to hear and be heard, to make the chaos of inner feeling not only sentient but sharable.” McLane responds to Louise Glück’s powerful willfulness and finds that Fanny Howe’s poems reveal “a refusal to turn away even as they seek asylum…to participate in the sick fictions of success or easy safety.” Percy Bysshe Shelley is the muse of the author’s sexual radicalism; she loves his youth, excess and intelligence. “To immerse yourself in him is to move through an extraordinary medium of thinking songs, sung thoughts,” she writes. McLane’s book is a gutsy poetic act on its own, as she writes measured, metrical prose that alters between rhythmic and affected, dropping commas or shifting perspective at will, as if in mimicry of her subjects. – Kirkus Reviews
Personal Essays Engage Power Of Poetry
NPR Book Review – June 28, 2012 (Excerpt)
Ralph Waldo Emerson tells us that poets are the beholders of ideas and the announcers of human experience’s necessary and casual details. Poets sing the songs of their selves and of nations. Even Emily Dickinson tells us she sings “to use the Waiting.”
In her essay, “My Emily Dickinson,” the American poet and critic Maureen McLane explains that Dickinson’s singing expresses our “vast poetic tradition” and our “profound consciousness of historical trauma.” In listening to and thinking “through” Dickinson’s poetry, McLane writes, we will better grasp our contemporary American lives. ThroughoutMy Poets, her collection of beautiful, experimental essays, McLane’s thinking through and appraising other poets is the central, commanding event.
In the book’s “proem,” McLane asks herself several times, “Why do you write poetry?” Borrowing lines from Wallace Stevens’ “The Man With the Blue Guitar,” she responds: “I am a native in this world / And think in it as a native thinks.” Here and throughout, McLane’s native attitude is soulful, metaphysical and witty. (Note: A proem is an archaic term for a book’s preface. McLane’s word choice, p-r-o-e-m, hints playfully at her style of mashing her lines of critical prose together with a poem’s precisely pressurized lineation.) [Read the full article...]
‘My Poets,’ by Maureen N. McLane’
The Washington Post Book Review – August 7, 2012 (Excerpt)
When a friend suggested to Pauline Kael that she write her memoirs, the New Yorker film critic pointed to her reviews and said, “I think I have.” For Kael, the story of her life was the story of the films she had watched and her reactions to them.
Works of art — film, music, poetry — can invoke, and sometimes define, an entire era of one’s life. Maureen N. McLane’s “My Poets” is part memoir, part literary appreciation; it’s a meditation on the poems that have intrigued, instructed, fascinated, troubled and sustained her. A poet and critic who teaches at New York University, she has written a book about “what most marked me” — works of poetry that she and many other readers love, by Chaucer, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Emily Dickinson, Shelley and Louise Gluck, among others.
But this is nonetheless a deeply personal and eccentric book. McLane is idiosyncratic not in the poets she selects, but in why she selects and how she responds to them. Chaucer and Moore, for instance, figure here largely because of the role their poetry played in McLane’s life when she fell out of love with a man and in love with a woman. The chapter on Chaucer focuses on his use of the word “kankedort,” which, according to the Oxford English dictionary, refers to “an awkward affair” and does not occur anywhere outside of “Troilus and Criseyde”:
“What should I say of kankedort other than the word constellates a time, a time of reading, a time of slow dawning and changing, of delicate then desperate realizing over many months and belatedly that I was in a kankedort; I was sick with love; I was in love with another; I knew not what to do; I did almost nothing; I found myself at dulcarnoun, at my wittes end; I almost did something bold; I didn’t; then I did; then the plot changed, or its true drift was revealed — if only in retrospect.” [Read the full article...]
Under the Influence - ‘My Poets,’ by Maureen N. McLane
The New York Times Book Review – August 17, 2012 (Excerpt)
Poetry changes nothing, W. H. Auden suggested. For once in his life he was wrong. Poetry changes everything, starting with the good behavior of anyone who reads a lot of it, as the poet-critic Maureen N. McLane discovers in her beguiling new book, “My Poets.” “I was good at school,” she writes. “The very things that made me good at school — a talent for aligning with authority, or for knowing what it wanted; a capacity for self-estranging self-discipline; an ability to use anxiety as a fuel; an overidentification with established codes — were precisely the things that might render me not a writer, not a poet.”
McLane has handily overcome that early handicap. Genially, charismatically subversive, “My Poets” has something in common with old-fashioned belles-lettres, and something in common with contemporary experimental writing. Part autobiography and part free-form criticism, the book includes essays about poets canonical (Shelley, Dickinson, Marianne Moore) and contemporary (Fanny Howe, Louise Glück), along with lineated poem-games like centos: poems where every line is taken from someone else. (McLane borrows from Sappho, August Kleinzahler, Bernadette Mayer, Frederick Seidel, H. D. and Campbell McGrath, among others.) In this book McLane comes into contact — repeatedly, playfully and with great seriousness — with verbal art, and is changed by it. “My Poets” is a delightful shock. It’s also a friendly book, inviting readers by its own example to let poems change them too, even those (like Marianne Moore) who feel they dislike poetry. [Read the full article...]
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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll
A Love Story of Shakespearean Dimension!
Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same strange who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]
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