One Thousand Things Worth Knowing

Abstract

Sunrise song; and, of course, Harjo’s signature blues and jazz, the winds working with her to sing through her sax. Throughout, there is a call and response with Harjo’s own poetic work, her own previous songs, notably “She Had Some Horses ” and “Perhaps the World Ends Here.” The book also includes as a poem—and nicely so—the text of her children’s book For a Girl Becoming, written for her first granddaughter as she came of age as a young woman. Harjo, now a grandmother to four granddaughters, comes fully into her role as matriarch in coming to terms with the loss of her friend, comedian Charlie Hill, and, more notably, the loss of her mother. Weary of travel, human greed, politics, and war in the world, Harjo becomes her own stable center and comes to her own healing through a literal return home to Tulsa. Early in the book, she says, echoing the Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys song, “Don’t take me back to Tulsa. I can only marry the music; the outlook is bleak.” Part of Harjo’s coming home, however, is finding her love at last, her new husband, Owen Sapulpa, to whom this book is dedicated. As she imparts wisdom, Harjo calls us back into relation with the world around us and all of its creatures, with each other, with ourselves. “By listening we will understand who we are in this holy realm of words.” (Editorial note: The Academy of American Poets recently announced Harjo as the winner of the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award, in recognition of “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.”) Kimberly Wieser University of Oklahoma Paul Muldoon. One Thousand Things Worth Knowing. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2015. 117 pages. The first challenging thing a reader encounters in this new collection by Paul Muldoon is the title itself. How literally can we expect the title to forecast the book? Is it really promising to be a selective compendium of facts urged on the reader, or an introduction literally to “things” (paintings, books, people , places) valued by the author, or possibly, and ironically, a challenge to large-scale knowledge acquisition at the expense of, say, wisdom or “the poetic”? These and other intricacies posed merely by the five words of the title do, in fact, forecast something of the reading experience of this volume, but the experience also includes a dazzling montage of arcane miscellany strung together at times only by the form of the poem itself. Consider these two consecutive quatrains : “As the echoes of Sherlock’s highpitched rebel yells / clung to the thatch in a smoke knot, / I’d only very gradually taken note / how Herbert Hoover’s casting spells // (and offering that “chicken in every pot”) / had come too late for Robert Frost, / cooped up as he’d been on the edge of a forest / with 300 Wyandottes.” We have the book’s characteristic disjunctive feel as the mind scrambles to connect Sherlock Holmes with Herbert Hoover with Robert Frost with Wyandottes and with the speaker’s ostensible meditation , all in a poem purportedly about—well, it’s hard to say. We are reminded of the wit and form of Byron; the encyclopedic mind of Pound; the zany, confusing abundance of Ashbery; and the technique of Jackson Pollack that relies heavily on the apprehending tendency of the human brain. These poems constitute an impressive and entertaining performance that, of itself, offers certain satisfactions: wit, humor, invention, technical sophistication —all good things. For some readers, these will be enough; other readers, however , will find too much fancy footwork and showmanship. They will fatigue at the proliferating non sequiturs, the endless inkblots posing as far-ranging associative thought, the picaresque poems like handfuls of pearls left unstrung by an organicism of subject or feeling. Josep Pla Life Embitters Peter Bush, tr. Archipelago The Catalonian perspective, which is simultaneously European and separatist, offers a unique picture of Europe after World War I. This narrative of short stories, starting in a small village in Catalonia and sweeping across Europe to bigger cities, depicts the continent after it has experienced so much tragedy and death. With stories heavy...