How to capture that? The problem with dailiness—how to write the day when it escapes us. It was the problem at the center of the work I was trying to write, although I was unsure whether I was really trying to write it. Never have I felt more emptied of the possibility of writing but more full of it at the same time. When did I realize I was suffering not from writer’s block but from refusal?
Drifts shows its “refusal” from beginning to end: it is the record and the result of Kate Zambreno refusing the subtitle of the book, which is a novel. “Is it a novel, though?” I kept asking myself, as I read. I get it, that’s the point: Drifts asks (Zambreno asks) us to ask, what is a novel, anyway? what does it look like to refuse the artifice of form (and narration and coherence and plot and all the other usual constituent elements of fiction)? what if instead of seeking unity you settled for fragments, what if instead of momentum you embraced meandering, what if you turned always inward, never outward? For people who like this kind of book, Drifts is definitely the kind of book they will like. I didn’t much like it, which won’t surprise anyone who has followed this blog for long. Novels in fragments usually strike me as cop-outs. Yes, it’s hard to finish the thing: to complete the thoughts, find the form, shape the narrative, make something solid out of fleeting impressions, make art out of experience, rather than recreate it. That’s the novelist’s job! So do your job: don’t put the unfinished pieces out into the world and excuse them on the grounds that experience, too, is fragmented and incoherent and random. I live that way: must I read that way too? Other readers love such fictions, though, including many readers whose insights I value highly. That’s what keeps things interesting!
There were definitely things about Drifts I did like. I liked learning about Rilke (I would have liked, better, a unified essay about Rilke); I enjoyed May Sarton’s scattered presence (I would have liked, better, an essay focused on Zambreno’s interest in Sarton). I liked the sense of what it might be like to be in Zambreno’s head—until I got tired of it, since it’s not a particularly restful or happy or illuminating place and being in my own head is hard enough these days, thank you very much. I got tired of the insistence on how hard it is to write, to be a writer, to write a novel. It started to seem unbearably self-absorbed, self-indulgent, solipsistic, all this moping around and lamenting and oversharing. “Think of Trollope!” I wanted to say. “Get out of your head and just tell us a story!” But of course that is not the kind of novel Zambreno is interested in.
I’m sounding more negative than I felt about the book as I read it. There were many moments in Drifts that interested me and others that moved me and others that upset me (I wasn’t prepared for the discussion of and image from Sarah Charlesworth’s series Stills). I found myself wondering why Zambreno didn’t just write it Drifts as memoir, rather than autofiction. I find it distracting reading works that refuse (that word again) to decide or clarify what they are, and perhaps my expectations would have been different if the pitch itself had been different. Still, the title gave fair warning, even if, arguably, the subtitle misled. I’m glad I finally gave Zambreno a try: now I know that she’s not for me. I’m not absolutely refusing to read anything more by her, but unless her other books are of a wholly different sort, I’ll let them drift away.
I’m just back from a long-awaited, oft-postponed visit to Vancouver. I came back with more books than I left with: no surprise there! A couple of them are ones I claimed from my mother’s ‘donate’ pile (one of my undertakings was to help her sort her many – many! – books so that the ones she wants most to read and reread are actually on shelves and the others eventually make their way into the hands of other readers); a couple of others were just too good to pass up when I spotted them on the bargain books shelves at the UBC bookstore; and one, Bach’s Sonic Tapestry, is by and inscribed by an old family friend.
I have read a fair amount of poetry in my life, for pleasure and for work. One of my very oldest books is an illustrated edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, and I went through a phase as a tween where I thought reading Poe’s “The Raven” or Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman” aloud was the height of literary engagement; around the same time, I was given an anthology of Romantic poetry, which (read obsessively but selectively) confirmed my youthful predilection for angst and pathos. Mostly I read fiction, though, so it remains surprising to me that it was a poem—Robert Graves’s “The Cool Web,” specifically—that turned me into an English major (thank you again, 
Since I became an English professor myself, my research and teaching has primarily focused on fiction, but I actually consider poetry the highest form of literary art, and I always look forward to the chance to work through some examples with my students, something I rarely get to do except in first-year courses or when I teach our ‘theory and methods’ course on close reading. Once upon a time we had a full-year Victorian Literature course, which meant plenty of poetry and even (rarer still) some of the period’s great “sage” writing, and today sometimes I get to teach our survey course on British Literature from 1800 to the present: hooray, more opportunities for poetry! I also regularly assign as much of Aurora Leigh as I dare in my seminar on the Victorian ‘woman question.’ (If you’re curious about how I approach these courses, 
When I teach poetry, something I often remark is that even the most skeptical among us tacitly acknowledges its power and value on special occasions—weddings, for example, and funerals. There is something about poetry that we need, not just at those times but especially at those times. I knew this already in theory but only really understood its truth when Owen died. Lines of poetry that I had read many times before became new to me, in terrible but also beautiful ways; I reread them over and over, and also sought out (and was offered) more. Sometimes the words brought comfort, but more often they offered confirmation: yes, this, this is how I feel, this is what I would say myself, if I could. I have found some passages of prose that bring the same relief, but it is still poetry I turn to when the grief is hardest to bear. I copy passages into my journal and save screen shots, an ongoing commonplace book of sorrow. I don’t necessarily think that this is the best way, the best reason, to read poetry. It can feel solipsistic; I wouldn’t want it to be the only way I (or anyone) read poetry. I wouldn’t want these to be the only poems I read.
I would like to read more poetry, and to read more different kinds of poetry better. You’d think this would be easy, and of course the steps themselves are simple enough, but the feeling of not “getting” it (which I have, cumulatively, spent many hours trying to train my students out of) does get in the way of my good intentions. Lately, therefore, I’ve come up with a little game I call “Poetry Serendipity”: every time I go up into the stacks of the university library, I take different routes on my way to and from whatever section I am specifically visiting and, as I wander, I scan the shelves for names I recognize or (more random and risky, but also more fun) for those tell-tale slim volumes that you just know must be poetry collections. Sometimes I have a few names in mind, so that if I notice I’m in the (say) contemporary American section around names starting with M or P, I can look around for (say) W. S. Merwin, or Marge Piercy. I sign out a few books, bring them home, and browse them without purpose or pressure. If I like something, I pause and reread; if I don’t connect, I close the book and move on without shame or regret—sometimes from very famous poets! I haven’t had many big successes, but pretty often I find at least one poem I like enough to copy out. Along the way I think I am learning something about myself as a poetry reader. I like form, or the feeling of it; I like clarity, sometimes (though not always) simplicity; I like concrete details; I like ideas but not elusive abstractions; I like moments in time, poignant or reflective; I like calm, and melancholy, not exultation; I do not like religion (with rare exceptions). Yet somehow I also like many poems that meet none of these specifications.
Novel Readings 