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Review by Stephen Page
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I’ve been thinking lately how most of my life I dreamed I would live in a shack in the mountains without telephone or T.V., walk the woods, eat berries, drink snowmelt, and write about place. I would of course visit a city on the weekends, for culture, you know, and sit on an unmade bed in an inexpensive hotel in the afternoon and watch soap operas on T.V. Seriously though, the culture part of the dream includes art, ballet, theatre, cinema, fine cuisine, wine, friends, a love interest, a once a week teaching job—then back to the shack for a week of writing and communing with the natural world. When I lived alone and single, which I have most of my life, it was easy to continue the shack dream, because by living alone, I was closer to that person on the mountain. Since I have been married though, the hermit of me has hid, or should I say, reclused, but did not completely disappear. He lurks among my cortical synopses, resides in my hippocampus. He and the shack where he lives will be a part of my life’s work. For a writer, there has to be a balance between writing and life. Some writers need more of one than the other. They way I see it, a writer may try to live a full life and write, but when the time comes to write, he needs to write, and only write. The writing has to be more important than life when he is writing about life. And (now I am getting away from the topic, but drawing a parallel), depending how private the writer is, a writer may want to edit, exclude, or delete his life from history and leave only his writings. Sooner or later, though, someone is going to tell his story—that is, what he did, how he treated people—and that someone may be his mother, his sister, his spouse, his child, his friend, his enemy, or his dumped lover (any of whom may not be very kind); so why shouldn’t a writer keep a diary, talk to people, interview, write letters—tell his side of the story. If he lived a good life (and that is, of course, a subjective phrase dependent upon cultural mores, subcultural trends, parental teachings, etc. etc.), he shouldn’t be ashamed about people knowing about his life. He shouldn’t be afraid. Not if he has courage. Anyway, along those lines (and I have to focus on the shack—place), let’s see how life develops, you and I, the reader and the writer, let’s see how our poems appear, how we diarize and how we are biographed. On those notes, let’s look at a book:
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Last week, I read e.e. cummings’s 100 Selected Poems. He’s a god of course who visited this earth to show off and play with people’s heads. Anyone could aspire to write half as well as him. He breaks downs language only to rebuild it to high art.
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Stephen Page is a poet in Argentina via Detroit Michigan. He can be found here: Stephen Page
North of Oxford 