January: Poetry x 12 (the year I was born)

Jan 29th, 2010

by Deb.

January’s Poetry x 12 challenge was to pick a book published the year you were born and read it.

I wanted to find a woman poet and had some good ideas, but every book I found was published the year before my birth. So I went with Ogden Nash and You Can’t Get There from Here, illustrated by Maurice Sendack.

I was excited about the idea of the book, the illustrations – excited by digging into something new.

I haven’t been able to finish it.

It’s silly stuff.

I like silly, playful. Light verse means what it says. It’s frothy, airy, fluffy, puffy. But it is too much to read all at once. At first I thought, maybe I am simply trying to eat too many sweets at one sitting. Perhaps these are after dinner mints, or truffles. And perhaps, if they were written today, they would be. But these are petit fours, marzipan. They just don’t match me, or what I think is the taste of my time. They are grandmother’s stale candies sitting in a cut crystal dish.

The poems in this collection were previously published in magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Harper’s (Bazaar and Magazine), Look, McCall’s, The New Yorker, Saturday Evening Post, True and the Man’s Magazine. One Etsy reseller describes a vintage copy of Man’s Magazine as “This thing is loaded with good old boy testosterone, whiskey, car ads and Christmas gift-giving, man-style!”

The Nash poems are also loaded with man-style, even if sometimes self-depreciating. And they can be racist, referencing the Chinese by using coolie hats as euphemism.

I tried to write a response poem. Something in rhyming verse that would tickle me. But I couldn’t.

I’m sure I am missing the mastery of Ogden Nash. But if so, I need a teacher to help me. I don’t get it on my own.

That said, I am glad I tried. And I am looking forward to February, which is “Read a poetry collection recommended on a blog.” I think I will read A Walk Through Memory Palace by Pamela Johnson Parker. It’s this month’s Virtual Book Club Tour at Read Write Poem. And I have the book and haven’t read all the way through, yet.