What’s John Adames Reading?
The death of Louise Glück this year and her winning the Nobel Prize prompted me to reread two volumes of her poetry – The Wild Iris and The Seven Ages – that I had purchased many years ago from the famous City Lights Books in San Francisco. One of my favorite poems from The Seven Ages is “Radium.” In this poem radium metaphorically refers to the world of work outside of the home and the choices we all face in this context. In the background, but skillfully not mentioned in the poem, are Madame Curie and her discovery of radium. Glück’s memories of her own anxieties as a young girl and her mother who did not pursue a career are both chilling and transcendent in the poem’s concluding stanza:
Time was passing. Time was carrying us
faster and faster toward the door of the laboratory,
and then beyond the door into the abyss, the darkness.
My mother stirred the soup. The onions,
by a miracle, became part of the potatoes.
I am also reading Simon Armitage’s A Vertical Art: on Poetry, based on his public lectures at Oxford. I am enjoying his insights into various poets and so far I am particularly interested in his comments on how Philip Larkin (one of my favourites) often ends his poems:
Nowhere in Larkin’s poems are the adverse and the negated more apparent than in his exit strategies – those terminating gestures at the end of his poems that regularly turn their backs on the reader, offer a blank stare or open a window onto nothingness.
Finally, I feel that almost any poet will certainly be intrigued by the book’s coda: “Nighty-five Theses: On the Principles and Practice of Poetry.”
In addition to a career as a professional musician, John Adames received a PhD in English from the University of Toronto and has taught courses in literature, music, writing and rhetoric at various universities and col- leges in Canada. He has published in First of the Month and, most recently, in First Literary Review-East.
Header photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash