The Malady of Death, by Marguerite Duras

Mythologies, by Roland Barthes

Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy. The best American fiction ever
written, I think. Its lyricism alone is worth the read.

Women of Wisdom, by Tsultrim Allione. This book offers introductions and translations of the “sacred biographies” of six Tibetan Buddhist women: Namgsa Obum, Machig Lapdron (1055-1145), Jomo Memo (12th c.), Machig Ongjo (12th c.), Drenchen Rema and A-Yu Khadro. I especially like Machig Lapdron’s story—which is one of offering up oneself—of feeding the demons until they pledge to become your allies.

The Only World We’ve Got: A Paul Shepherd Reader, by Paul Shepherd

The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey

Aspects of the Feminine, by C.G. Jung

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau

The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

Leap, by Terry Tempest Williams

The Deep Well Tapes: Volumes I-III, by Marc Bregman with Susan Marie Scavo

Loose Woman, poetry by Sandra Cisneros

Blue Desert, by Charles Bowden

Heidi, by Johanna Spyri. The most beloved book of my childhood—which probably explains why I now keep goats.

The Abstract Wild, by Jack Turner

Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization, by Richard
Manning

What Narcissism Means to Me, by Tony Hoagland. Funny, smart poems.

Now & Then: The Poet’s Choice Columns 1997-2000, by Robert Hass. A writer friend gave this book to me. An anthology of poems containing brief, helpful introductions by Hass. I read it like apples: one entry a day.

The Book of Light by Lucille Clifton. Try this on: “the earth is a living thing / [. . . ] is a black and living thing / is a favorite child / of the universe / feel her rolling her hand / in its kinky hair / feel her brushing it clean.”

The Story and Its Writer, edited by Ann Charters. An anthology of short fiction which approaches fiction primarily from a writer’s perspective. The appendices are packed with writers writing about their own work and the work of others.

Books I’ve finished in the last three months:

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. This is exhilarating. By the end of it, your electrons have jumped their tracks. It also makes you chuckle a few times every chapter. For example: “In 1781 Herschel became the first person in the modern era to discover a planet. He wanted to call it George, after the British monarch, but was overruled. Instead it became Uranus.”

Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, Hard Night, and The Long Home, by Christian Wiman. I recently finished a “study” of Wiman’s works. His formal poems make me think of an edgier Frost; they are poignant and memorable and make me want to read more contemporary formal poetry. Ambition and Survival is a collection of essays, reviews, and more. This book mixes the personal with the literary so that as you read Wiman’s insights on Milton, you get glimpses into Wiman’s life. He uses the literary to elevate the personal and vice versa.

Home & Away: The Old Town Poems, by Kevin Miller. Lyrical poems of place and people a la Edward Hopper.

Earthly Meditations ,by Robert Wrigley. A new and selected book of poems. Many striking “nature” poems.

Generations, by Pattiann Rogers. No one makes science sing so well.

Essays I’ve read in the last two months as models for my writing class:

“Muck and its Entanglements: Cleaning the Outhouse.” This essay by John Berger addresses the human condition—mortality, spirituality, nature—through a description of shoveling excrement. It’s provocative, revealing, and funny.

”Chores.” A beautiful, visceral distillation of Deb Marquart’s The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere. Reminds me a bit of Jim Heynen’s work, but with much more grit. When one of my students called it gross last week, I knew it was a perfect model.

“The Men We Carry in Our Minds.” This essay by Scott Russell Sanders addresses class and gender issues through moving personal reflection. My Latino students love it; they know exactly where Sanders is coming from—where he came from. They carry the same blue collared men in their minds.

“The Deer at Providencia.” This essay by Annie Dillard explores the place of suffering in the human condition. It is hard to shake—in a good way.

Periodicals I’ve read recently:

Poetry
Ecotone
Orion
The Georgia Review (the current issue, Spring 2009, focuses on culture and the environment; new work by David Gessner and other favorites)
Hayden’s Ferry Review
Flyway
Lyric
AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle

Books I’ve strayed from but will finish because I’m a lifetime member of the “clean your plate” club:

Wisdom of the Mythtellers, by Sean Kane
The Art of the Commonplace, by Wendell Berry

Books on the “to read” shelf:

The Flight of the Iguana: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature, by David Quammen
Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold, edited by Luna B. Leopold
The Greening of a Nation?, by Hal K. Rothman
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, by Janisse Ray
The Final Forest: The Battle for the Last Great Trees of The Pacific Northwest, by William Dietrich
In the Wilderness, by Kim Barnes
Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee, edited by Earl Ingersoll
Our Lady of the Forest, by David Guterson
The Tie that Binds, by Kent Haruf
Just Before Dark, by Jim Harrison
American Bloomsberry, by Susan Cheever
Too many books of poetry to list . . . Alas.

Books on the “to buy” list:

Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems, by John Felstiner
Anything by Scott Russell Sanders

Non-Fiction
1. Mountain Dialogues, by Frank Waters. A gift from a friend. I admit that I had never read Waters before, and further sheepishly admit that I don’t know much about him. But how rare it is to pick up a book and get the sense you are in the presence of an old and wise friend. I have been thinking about the New Mexican desert all winter, so this came to me at just the right time - as books so often do.

2. Two Billion Acre Farm, by Robert West Howard. A history of agriculture in America. Published in the fifties, I’m not sure if it’s still in print—in fact, I don’t know if any of his books are still in print, but they should be; Howard has a wonderful, lively style and sensibility that is often very funny. Though it is a little old fashioned, this book is as relevant today as it was when it was published. The early settlers’ diversified farms, the cotton gin, the invention of canning, the revolution of the feed industry, the loss of topsoil, the invention of barbed wire and how it all shaped our young country—it’s all in there. And his underlying message of the need for sustainability is, of course, that much more vital and more pressing today than it was fifty years ago.

3. Horses at Work, by Ann Greene. A look at manpower and horsepower shaping America’s cities in the industrial age.

4. America Yesterday, by Eric Sloane. I am a big Eric Sloane fan, and always have one of his books near at hand, just to page through . . .

5. The Snoring Bird, by Bernd Heinrich. Ravens in Winter. . . The Trees in My Forest . . . Bumblebee Economics . . . Winter World . . . Heinrich is unparalleled. My father gave me this book, Heinrich’s memoir about his father and his beginnings as a scientist. Though I haven’t started it yet, I have become a big fan of his over the years and am very much looking forward to it.

6. The Art of Eating, by M.F.K. Fisher. Also a gift from a friend. A classic, and should be required reading for all interested in “slow” food.

Fiction
7. Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton. In her introduction, she writes that she tried to create characters who are like New England granite. They are.

8. Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh

9. Three Famous Short Novels: Spotted Horse, Old Man, The Bear, by William Faulkner

10. . . . and four new and exciting debut short story collections:
The Boat, by Nam Le
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, by Daniyal Mueenuddin
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, by Kevin Wilson

I’ve been a resident of the Sunbelt for some time now, and when the parlous state of our economy and regional politics gets to be too much I need to remind myself that this part of the country is not just a bad example—it has also shaped a lot of cutting-edge thought into how people and place interact. I pick up a copy of Wallace Stegner’s The Sound of Mountain Water, perhaps: brilliant and clear-eyed essays about the West’s problems and promise. Or I read about Aldo Leopold, who came to this region almost exactly a hundred years ago as a freshly minted forestry graduate. A tenderfoot. But he watched and listened, and soon learned of the region’s cowboys, Native Americans, and New Mexico farmers (to say nothing of wolves, pinyon jays, and thick-billed parrots) how land should and should not be managed. His intellectual journey is well limned in Julianne Lutz Newton’s Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey: Rediscovering the Author of A Sand County Almanac. Wisdom, it turns out, and not just callousness and greed, resides in American places too.

No book I’ve read in recent months, though, has given me more pleasure than one by my good friend Jim Malusa, who some years ago had the brilliant idea of riding his bicycle to the lowest point on each continent. It took him a while (turns out that Djibouti’s a tough place to get to, and to ride in), but the end result of his journeys was a great travelogue, Into Thick Air: Biking to the Bellybutton of Six Continents. Traveling with scant supplies but with enormous patience and good humor, Jim met the locals, saw the sights, and conveys a great lesson that’s all the more important in an era so easily given to xenophobia: namely, that people all over the place are pretty much alike. I’m hoping he travels somewhere else soon so that he can write about it some more.

Hold Everything Dear, by John Berger. The poetry of polemic, under Berger’s tender, unflinching gaze, telling the essential stories which are the truths of our time.

Upside Down, by that enigmatic poet of fire and love, Eduardo Galeano.

Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error, on the neuroscience of thought, which necessarily includes the role of emotions. (Three cheers.)

Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, a sea-play of the human heart by a part-Maori woman wearing (and deserving) a Shakespearean mantle.

Nick Broomfield’s “The Battle for Haditha.” This film speaks volumes about the Iraqi war, from the point of view of both the brutalized U.S. Marines and the Iraqi civilians.  Both points of view? Yes. That is its genius and its humanity.

Patricia Riley (Ed.), Growing Up Native American: An Anthology. A revealing, eloquent, telling book of Native American voices.

Nancy Huston’s Fault Lines. A psychologically brilliant novel about how wider politics narrates its hopes and tortures in the lives of individuals, through generations of one family.

Nils-Aslak Valkeapää‘s The Sun, My Father. The shamanic Sámi poet recreates the landscapes of northern Europe on the page.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. A post-apocalyptic world where the only possible chance for humanity is fragile and almost-unworded grace.

For days when writing feels like pushing a Buick uphill with my forehead, I read pretty much anything by Charles Bowden, Joan Didion, or David Foster Wallace. I particularly like Bowden’s Down By the River, a story about murder and family and drugs, wrapped around a steel spine of excellent investigative reporting on Mexico-U.S. drug policy. I often re-read Didion’s essay “At the Dam” to study her clear, concise language. And I read Wallace’s essays in Consider the Lobster for his attention to detail, humor, and brilliant insights.

In honor of President Obama’s first days in office, my book club is reading Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin, the 1960 best-selling account of a white man who darkens his skin and lives as an African American in the South. It’s fascinating.

Other books that I’m reading right now are ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan’s latest, Where Our Food Comes From; This I Believe, a collection of the NPR series, edited by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman,; The Best American Short Stories of 2008, edited by Salman Rushdie; Table of Contents, by John McPhee; and a collection of W.S. Merwin poems, Present Company. Also, I’m trying, really trying, to get through Ken Wilber’s The Marriage of Sense and Soul. I would like to say I’m reading this to expand my mind, which is partly true, but it’s more accurate to say that I’m trying to win points with my boyfriend, who is a big Wilber fan.

In general, I read books not for self-improvement but because I love stories. Some of the best fiction I’ve read in the past year is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon, The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolano and, though I’d read it before, Dune, by Frank Herbert.

Here are the books which make up a kind of inner circle, the ones I pencil in constantly, and with which I have a daily companionship. They’re listed in the order we met.

* Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1961)
* Anon, The Cloud of Unknowing (Doubleday, 1973)
* Louis Bromfield, Malabar Farm (Harper, 1948)
* Helen and Scott Nearing, Living the Good Life (Schocken, 1970)
* Henry Beston, Northern Farm (Ballantine, 1964)
* Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience (Penguin, 1983)
* John Woolman, Journal and a Plea for the Poor (Citadel, 1972)
* Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land (North Point, 1981)
* Loren Eiseley, The Star Thrower (Random House, 1978)
* M.C. Richards Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person (Wesleyan, 1964)
* David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous (Random House, 1997)
* Clary Illian, A Potter’s Workbook (University of Iowa, 1999)
* Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture  (Tagari, 1991)
* Toby Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden:  A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture (Chelsea Green, 2000)

My family did not own many books, nor was there a public library near by.  They were readers, but they lived in small spaces and followed what I think must have been the nineteenth century habit of reading the same books over and over.  Those writers had to stand up to time: Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Edgar Allen Poe, Alfred Lord Tennyson (as an American child, I thought “Lord” was his middle name, or a nickname like those of blues musicians I listened to on the radio after hours). The books had to answer, as well, to a variety of readers, maiden aunts through young children, because there not many books written especially for children in those days, once you outgrew Ferdinand the Bull and A Prayer for Little Things (though actually I still have not outgrown either of those). There was the inevitable family Bible, illustrated with grisly decapitations and Jael busy with her tentpegs, fascinating to a sheltered child).  I malingered at home for long stretches of my early school career, so I read the family books again and again, memorizing good and bad literature indiscriminately.

I was attracted to short stories, perhaps because I thought they were aimed at children, and my mother’s old college texts offered Henry James, Katharine Mansfield, Joseph Conrad, Jack London, and a particularly large selection of American regionalists. One that had profound consequences for me was Wilbur Daniel Steele’s story “For They Know Not what They Do.”  Perhaps I was a rather solitary and strange child, growing up before the invention of psychology, but it was clear to me early on that my parents thought I was a suspicious character. Our family had been profoundly marked by the vivid insanity of a few of its members, and they were scanning me for signs. I didn’t fit in well at school, being precocious at things like singing and worthless at what everyone took for granted. I couldn’t do arithmetic because I thought each number had a personality. I only wanted to deal with two, five, six and eight. I had an antipathy to three and seven.  I was more than usually dubious about myself, likely with reason.

So this story of Steele’s saved my bacon, or gave me the life I have, anyway.  It’s the story of a romantic, passionate boy who uncovers his family history of hereditary insanity and begins, with a kind of sinister and joyful determinism, to act out the violence of his father and grandfather.  His mother saves him by revealing that he is the illegitimate son of a musician, shaming herself in his prudish eyes. His mother is lying, as he later discovers, but meanwhile the boy has taken up his “real” father’s cello and put down the rusty knife.  In fact, the story plays out back stage at the Philharmonic, where the boy, now a famous musician, is musing to a friend about how playing the cello channels the drives that would otherwise make a man insane.

This story was perhaps the first inkling I had that family is not destiny, that art is a path to sanity, that you had better be careful what you believe because it will determine many outcomes.

My work in the world has led me to poise—and sometimes pratfall—between empirical and contemplative inquiry.  This is where poets are likely to hang out:  those who have meant the most to me are Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Galway Kinnell, Mary Oliver, Mark Doty, and—two younger writers who may not be household names—Todd Davis and the Irish poet Kerry Hardie. All the writers in my inner circle claim some kind of liminal space:  David Abrams, both phenomenologist and working magician; Clary Illian, who acknowledges the intricate technical decisions a potter must make in order to engage a mystical dialogue with space, volume, and time.  The anonymous fourteenth-century monk who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing passes through it on his way to God.  For him it is a condition of wordlessness, where he loses the holy names his culture has given him and cannot yet articulate new understanding. John Woolman, an 18^th century Quaker journal-keeper honored this ground as “the place where words come from,” as though it were a spring in the forest from which language flows instead of water.

I like words that come from this well, new, cold, and telling stories about inner space; but I also like the formulas of tradition, science and craft.  An Edo bowl has much to say. I play the violin two or three hours a day, remembering my friend the soil scientist Francis Hole, who committed his retirement to learning Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin. Francis thought about this music as a kind of nutrition for brain and bone, vital as carrots or compost. 

My children and I say that we practice the Religion of Food and Beauty. Music, these days, is enough silence for me. And, otherwise I am in the world, making gardens or pots. Thoreau seems to have taken a similar journey, moving from spiritual inquiry to botany, if we are to judge by his late journals. One might think he had abandoned the search for God;  possibly, he had found him.

Shadow Country, by Peter Matthiessen. I’m not an ardent reader of novels. But Peter is special. First, his books were enormously important to me when I was young. Now I live not far from him and I’ve gotten to know him a bit, and knowing his speaking voice and a little of his personality, I like to see and hear him working on the page. This book was thirty years in the making, and Peter turned down many a fishing invitation in the final marathon push, which lasted several years. It’s interesting to see him assuming the different personae in the book, using accents and language and inflections from a different time and place. I also like getting a sense of the lay of the land from a time when southwest Florida was just emerging from wilderness to the over-exploitation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yet still lay largely beyond the law.

Winter World, by Bernd Heinrich. Another hero of my youth whom I’ve recently met and gotten to know a bit, Heinrich is perhaps the most perceptive nature writer working today. He’s a real scientist who relays reliable information and dances at the edge of what is not known with precision, insight, and a gentle, easy conversational tone which I not only greatly admire but also, as a writer myself, envy. It’s a terrific book for anyone with even the slightest interest of animals in winter, because it takes something familiar and superficial, a chickadee at your bird-feeder, say, and instantly gives you a much deeper, more intimate relationship with that being. In a nutshell, these animals are all, in their ways, so incredible they’re almost beyond belief.

The Moon Pulled Up An Acre Of Bass, by Peter Kaminsky. This is a book about an October spent fishing every day. While that might seem like too much of a good thing—and it can be—the book includes many people and places I know well on the east end of Long Island. So when I can’t go fishing, and now that my boat is out of the water for the winter and my recreation includes birding and cutting firewood, I can take an occasional fishing outing on the page. The author gave me the book this fall when I took him out for a few hours in my boat, so the sense of familiarity is all the more special and personal.

Grey Seas Under, by Farley Mowat. A great writer, Mowat’s Sea of Slaughter was one of my touchstones in inspiring me toward writing books myself. A recent gift from a friend, this is the only book at my bedside that I haven’t yet delved into. It’s about a Canadian ocean-going salvage tug whose work was rescuing massive ships in trouble, usually in horrific storm conditions. The jacket says, “the stout ship and her brave crew saved hundreds of vessels and thousands of lives as they battled their ancient enemy, the North Atlantic.” I’ve never seen the sea as an enemy but it sure can be terrifying when you’re too far from land and it comes up and traps you. I’ve been on ships when the chairs were flying, and at least once when I was by no means sure I’d ever see shore again.

I usually have a novel going but it takes me a long time to get through it. I’m a slow and deliberate reader. I like to know the circumstances of any novel I read—the context in which it was written and something about the person who brought it into the world.

The writing I do is pretty much nonfiction; I find my reading habits gravitate in that direction, too. Currently I’m halfway through The Beak of the Finch, by Jonathan Weiner. The fiction on my shelf fights a losing tug-of-war with the field guides. I sit quite content with these books, learning about the migrations of gray whales, the winter diet of pikas. I’m delighted to discover that the fluorescent yellow dot I spotted under a Sitka spruce last weekend was an aggregation of slime mold coalesced for the purpose of propagation. The cedar waxwings that materialize each fall to feed on my backyard crabapple, the scrabbling of possums at night, the strange caterpillar in the garage, the leggy spider . . . all beg investigation.

In the back of my mind I keep a list of great books and great writers I haven’t yet made my way to read. I pick away at them. I have next to my bed a collection of short essays by John Updike about works of visual art that have captured his fancy. I’m progressing at the pace of about an essay a week. The writing is superb—I’m reminded that I should someday get around to reading Updike’s novels. In the past year or so I’ve read a novella by Naguib Mahfouz, poems by Elizabeth Bishop, a masterful collection of Chekhov tales. I try to stretch myself. I try to remember that people with different sensibilities might have something valid to tell me, even if it’s as simple as how to put together a sentence.

And yet . . . Sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly doubtful about the assumptions of the world, I wonder why I should feel burdened to complete any particular reading list. Many a worthy bit of writing lacks the imprimatur of humanities professors. I spent an hour recently reading a Kinkoed collection of poems handed me by the author, a shabby fellow hanging out next to the post office. The poems were quite good. I handed him a buck; I should have given him ten.

I look back over my past ten years of reading and I see that there are some types of writing that I approach with a sense of obligation and others to which I go willingly. The latter is represented by writers who speak to my particular worldview. In the realm of high fiction, Wallace Stegner and John Steinbeck. Poets such as Theodore Roethke and Mary Oliver. Chroniclers of nature such as David Quammen and Rick Bass. I’m OK with this notion of coming back around to what interests me, to what speaks to me most forcefully. Eventually you have to plant your flag on one side or the other, whether as a reader, a writer, a citizen. Moby Dick can wait.

I recommend The Three Questions and Zen Shorts by writer and illustrator Jon J. Muth, who also combines enduring stories with engaging visual scenes. For straight-up fun my daughter will pull Skippyjon Jones (Judy Schachner) from the shelf. Equally entertaining is Skippy Jon Jones and the Big Bones. I am grateful my daughter now has the patience for chapter books. We are starting into one of my long-time favorites, The Education of Little Tree, by Forrest Carter.

In the small window between my daughter’s bedtime and mine I often pick up a volume of poetry from the jumble of books on my bedside window sill. The thumb-worn copy of Stephun Dunn’s New and Selected Poems is never far from reach. Billy Collins’ Sailing Alone Around the Room is also on top of the heap. I often re-read any of Wendell Berry’s fiction like poetry. Last night I flipped through Memory of Old Jack just to marvel at Wendell’s graceful negotiation through the complex convolutions of the human mind.

To keep despondency about our ecological trajectory at bay, I recently read Tim Flannery’s The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its People and R. Dale Guthrie’s Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe. Both books widen my temporal world view to the point I can breathe away some of my anxiety over all that we will not accomplish in time. On average, species are only around for 4 million years. Our looming extinction is nothing new. We’ll just bring the average down a bit.

In my woodshop, I am currently on a door-making jag. At night I sketch and read in anticipation of the next day’s puzzles. For anyone interested in building their own doors I recommend either Door Making by John Birchard or Handcrafted Doors and Windows by Amy Zaffarano Rowland.

The Tarot, History, Symbolism, and Divination, Robert M. Place

A revolving library of tarot reference books; two favorites:
Tarot Plain & Simple, by Anthony Lewis.
A thorough yet easy-to-use reference text to the Wait-Smith deck and its adaptations.
Complete Book of Tarot Reversals, Mary K. Greer.
An excellent study in the art of the nuanced reading, an apt counter-example to more reductive and formulaic treatments of tarot symbolism.

Astrology: Understanding the Birth Chart, Kevin Burk.
Helpful overview of our psychological & spiritual development through the zodiac signs. Clear introduction to the houses & planets.

The Art of War, Sun Tzu (Thomas Cleary translation).
Several accomplished warriors comment on the military strategies of Sun Tzu. I see The Prince as this book’s Western complement and recommend reading them both. In the most fundamental way, each throws light on the failures of our recent policies which have led us into an unnecessary war, and keep us in that war.

Essays on historical fencing (Western Long Sword), authors contributing to the ARMA website.
Source materials on the art of fencing by Johannes Liechtenauer, Hanko Döbringer
These works are of greatest value to anyone working with the Western long sword. Of interest to others is how acerbically they debunk popular myths of European sword-fighting during the Medieval and Renaissance periods. Too, as in the study of any martial art, the reading gets one to think more attentively about how to move in space and respond to conflicts at all levels from physical to spiritual.

Some Books I’ve Read over the Last Year

Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl

The Call and the Echo, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
For me, a door-opening insight into the Sufi relationship with the Beloved. Helpful reading for anyone seeking to balance on the one hand a passionate lover-like relationship with Spirit and on the other hand the need to remain grounded in this world. Interesting to compare with Harold Bloom’s exploration of the Baptist faith in his evocative The American Religion.

Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes
First-rate story-telling. Insightful analysis of fairy tales and myths. One of those books that left me feeling wiser after having read it.

The Maiden King, Robert Bly & Marion Wood
Jungian-oriented analysis of a Russian fairy tale; like Bly’s Iron John, it offers an inroad to the rich psychological symbolism available in myths and fairy tales.

Boundaries of the Soul, June Singer
Popular orientation to Jung. Interesting, but I’d recommend going straight to Jung’s essays and let your questions guide you backwards to secondary sources. The Portable Jung (ed. Joseph Campbell) has an engaging selection of Jung’s writings.

King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, Robert Moore, Douglas Gillette

78 Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack
Excellent orientation to tarot for those seeking a thoughtful and soulful relationship with this Western esoteric tradition.

The Cloud of Unknowing, author unknown
Insightful, though parts of it went over my head. The Church’s chauvinism informs various passages.

Odyssey, Homer (Robert Fagels trans.)

Meetings at the Edge, Stephen Levine
Conversations with those in the act of dying. Helps to recall me to a larger perspective. Levine’s Who Dies? is effective in this way, too.

Some Literature that Gives Me Insight, Inspiration, and a Path to Audacity. Courage-Making Books

Plays, Shakespeare
One Bowl, One Robe, Ryōkan (Zen poetry, trans. John Stevens)
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Song of Myself, Walt Whitman
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Iliad, Homer, Robert Fagels trans.
Sermons, Meister Eckhart
Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essays, Samuel Johnson
Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
Iron John, Robert Bly
Owning Your Own Shadow, Robert Johnson
Inner Work, Robert Johnson (on working with dreams and active imagination)
Survival at Auschwitz, Primo Levi
Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, John (Fire) Lame Deer & Richard Erdoes
The Disasters of War, Francisco Goya (collection of 80 plates)
The Look of Distance, Walter J. Slatoff (Reflections on suffering & sympathy in modern literature)
The Divine Comedy (Inferno), Dante (Pinsky trans.)
Beyond Belief, Secret Gospel of Thomas, Elaine Pagels
On the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Frederich Nietzsche (Walter Kaufmann trans.)
The Light Inside the Dark, John Tarrant
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki
Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell trans.
Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
The Bible: Genesis, Samuel I and II, Job, Ecclesiastes, Psalms, Jeremiah, Gospels

Some Literature that Has Helped to Inform My Sense of Place

The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx
Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash
A God Within, Rene Dubos
Beyond Geography, Frederick Turner
Nature, Man and Woman, Alan Watts
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
The Norton Book of Nature Writing, Robert Finch, John Elder, eds. (anthology)
Essays, Wendell Berry
Writings, images, Orion magazine
The Land of Little Rain, Mary Austin
The Complete Poems, Elizabeth Bishop
The Collected Poems, Wallace Stevens
The Essential Rumi, Coleman Barks trans.

The Bible

A couple of years ago, I spent a year reading the entire Bible. It was one of the richest reading experiences I’ve had. I used the New American Bible as my primary text and compared passages with my copies of the King James and New Jerusalem versions. I filled five notebooks with personal commentary and contextualized my reading experience with many books, including the following selection. Most show my admittedly non-apologetic bias:

The Oxford Companion to the Bible, Bruce M. Metzger, Michael D. Coogan, eds.
God, Jack Miles
The Great Code, Northrop Frye
Jesus: A Life, A.N. Wilson
Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, John Dominic Crossan
Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, Marcus J. Borg
The Gnostic Scriptures, Bentley Layton
The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels
The American Religion, Harold Bloom
Meister Eckhart, Raymond B. Blakney, trans.

Some Books I Look Forward to Reading

Will to Believe, William James
The Hour of Our Death, Philippe Ariès
History of God, Karen Armstrong
Symposium, Plato
Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timothy Ferris
Purgatorio, Dante (W.S. Merwin trans.)
Ideas and Opinions, Albert Einstein
Critique of Religion and Philosophy, Walter Kaufmann
Fearful Symmetry, Northrop Frye

Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama (Three Rivers Press, 2006)
The first thing that strikes you is how much this man loves life. He’s steeped in history, geography, philosophy, economics and law and he sees and responds passionately to the dignity of all people regardless of their political affiliations. To read this makes me feel humble. Barack makes it clear that he cares about the future of our country and wants to make a difference. When I had given up, like many Americans, on politicians, it’s heartening to know that Obama stubbornly soldiered on in spite of my cynicism.

The Wild Trees (or anything by Richard Preston) (Random House, 2007)
This writer claims my heart and soul in this book about a bunch of scruffy college kids who discover the tallest trees along the coast of California. A page-turner, this book of nonfiction reads like a novel. I couldn’t wait to go to bed every night to see what had transpired while I was away; the landscape is that vivid and the characters are that alive. I’ve since read Preston’s The Hot Zone, a harrowing account of the spread of a filovirus (ebola/AIDS), and the dry cave carved by elephant tusks and covered in guano where it all seems to have begun; The Cobra Event, a frightening “novel” filled with true facts about the secret of biological warfare; and First Light, a gaggle of star geeks dukin’ it out with the universe. Preston peels back the layers to reveal the inner workings of the Hale Telescope—I capitalize here because the Hale is a main character—are almost as exciting as the descriptions of quasars and quarks that pulse along the outskirts of the known universe. You couldn’t make an action/adventure movie as good as any of Preston’s nonfiction books. He specializes in real people caught up in extraordinary situations who are brave, selfless and true.

The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, Brady Udall (W.W. Norton, 2001)
An intrepid half-Apache boy stumbles through the minefield of life with a Mormon foster family. Oddly uplifting and weirdly beautiful.

Perma Red, Debra Magpie Earling (Putnam, 2002)
Louise White Elk is a formidable female character in this story of love and betrayal on the Flathead Indian Reservation. Intimate, timeless, poetic.

The World Without Us, Alan Weisman (Thomas Dunne Books, 2007)
This book is a grand experiment of the imagination. Weisman creates a world of poetic jungle stillness that surrounds the earth after the people and machines that have dominated it have fallen by the wayside. Disquietingly beautiful.

Dog Years, Mark Doty (Harper Perennial, 2008)
I’ve taught Mark Doty’s poems in my college classes for years. Whenever I crack open one of his books and begin to read, my students, even the most recalcitrant, surly and bored among them, sit up in their chairs. They know they are being spoken to by someone who cares about them and about the world they live in, offering it up in all its unbearable brilliance. Now I find myself wanting to teach his memoir, Dog Years, not only because Doty’s prose reads like poetry, but because he speaks with unbridled and unashamed admiration for his beloved dogs. A darkly lovely book.

The First Word: A Search for the Origins of Language, Christine Kenneally (Penguin, 2008)
Fascinating fundamentals. Kenneally gives us a remarkably readable history of language that includes the work being done to date with all “speaking” species.

Poor Folk, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1846)
This is Dostoevsky’s first novel. I came across it in a hotel room in Italy where I was teaching at a conference. It was one of two books in English and I was touched by the lives of these people who have so little and share everything. Of course it doesn’t turn out well for the main character, Makar Devushkin. Fascinating to read in these dire economic times.

Later the Same Day, Grace Paley (Penguin, 1986)
Short stories about tightly-knit communities of people who are all deeply involved with one another. Paley’s gift for dialogue makes these stories worthy of many re-readings.

In the Next Galaxy, Ruth Stone (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)
Winner of the National Book Award, this is one that deserves its honors.

The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, Marie Howe (W.W. Norton, 2008)
Marie Howe is a poet of grand simplicity. Written post 9/11 from the streets of New York, these are “talking” poems. You often feel Howe is sitting with you over a cup of coffee telling you what it’s like to be alive.

One Secret Thing, Sharon Olds (Knopf, 2008)
That this poet has not yet received the Pulitzer for her body of work is a disgrace. The woman cannot write a bad poem. If you want to know what it’s like to be a wife, a mother, a lover, a woman, read anything by Sharon Olds and feel the world shift on its axis. Like Preston, I will read anything she writes. This one is still on order at my local bookstore.

All-American Poem, Matthew Dickman (Copper Canyon Press, 2008)
New kid on the block Matthew Dickman will give you faith in poetry’s future. Human, humane, humongous! A Whitmanesque ride through the streets of the crazed American mind written with velocity and verve. A book for a new generation of poets.

Dismantling the Hills, Michael McGriff (Pitt Poetry Prize, 2008)
McGriff is another terrific young poet in the vein of Philip Levine. Quietly hard-edged image-driven narratives about ordinary Americans struggling to survive in the small town logging town of Coos Bay, Oregon.

Good Friday Kiss, Michelle Bitting (C & R Press, 2008)
Bitting’s poems are exciting, enticing, and refreshingly straightforward. Published by a new small press worth keeping an eye on.

What Narcissism Means to Me, Tony Hoagland (Graywolf Press, 2003)
Seriously funny. An exploration of American psychology through the eyes of a quirky poet who can describe a sunset like it’s the first night on earth. 

The Human Line, Ellen Bass (Copper Canyon Press, 2007)
A female, lesbian, Jewish, west coast Billy Collins. Poems for every ordinary extraordinary occasion.

Old War, Alan Shapiro (Houghton Mifflin, 2008)
Tonight I’m reading Alan Shapiro’s latest book, Old War. It’s a strange and delicate thing, and a romp as well. The reader falls into the world of the poems, and that world is filled with mist, light, ghosts, but also egg rolls, dogs, and suspension bridges. The titles of many poems bleed into the first line, e.g.:

Where
will you go.
little vagabond…

Clear
and unavoidable, that’s how you have to see it ...

Now
my daughter on the swing explained,
doesn’t exist ...

These poems draw me in with the first line, like a hooked fish. One of my favorites is the final poem in the book, Open Mike Night in Heaven. Every bad joke ever written and by the last line you’re not sure why you’re crying. Domestic, human, profound, the poems work on you, and work you over.

Well, after watching Stephen Colbert I’ve just added Hope on a Tightrope, by Cornel West.

This is where TV comes in handy. I get some of my best book recommendations from Colbert and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. This economic downturn may bring people back to books and libraries.

http://www.livehopelove.com/
Poet Kwame Dawes and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting introduce HOPE: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica, a multimedia exploration of the epidemic’s human face. The interactive website combines Dawes’s poetry with original music, essays, documentaries and personal video recollections from those living with the disease and those who care for them. The work has been featured in Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post and public television’s Foreign Exchange; it is also the subject of an hour-long radio documentary scheduled for release this December.

http://www.goodreads.com/
Founded by Otis Chandler in January of 2007, the online networking site enables you to list which books you’re reading, have read, or are about to read.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/
And of course, Orion. Though for this one, I’m much fonder of the print version. It’s a work of art.

But for the books—first, some poetry books I took out of the library. Mostly these are what was available in MacDowell’s own collection, but also a few from the Peterborough Public LIbrary, which kindly offers colony fellows a card for their stay’s duration. These are books I wanted with me so that my shelves would not be empty, so that my instrument felt surrounded by an orchestra, so that my mind, heart, and ear could be inspired, awakened, reminded, and tuned. Of these, a couple were newly read, the rest old companions I saw were there and simply wanted at hand.

Czeslaw Milosz, The Collected Poems

Wislawa Szymborska, Monologue of a Dog

Jane Cooper, The Flashboat: Collected Poems

Charles Simic, Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk

Rae Dalven, translator, Modern Greek Poetry

Galway Kinnell, A New Selected Poems

Robert Frost, Collected Poems

Emily Dickinson, Collected Poems

Frank X. Gaspar, Night of a Thousand Blossoms

Christina Davis, Forth a Raven (an astonishingly beautiful and strong first book)

Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous

William Butler Yeats, Collected Poems

Robert Hass, Human Wishes

Arthur Waley, translator, Translations from the Chinese

I also carry a large number of poems in my computer, in a folder titled “Other People’s Poems.” Of these, I drew strong sustenance from a small, rhymed poem by Robert Creeley, “End,” which I memorized; two poems by the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade; a sheaf of Jack Gilbert’s work; and some works of the Portuguese poet Pessoa.

These are the prose books I read while there:

Tolstoy, War and Peace (I was three-fourths through re-reading this when I left for this trip, and the new translation was too heavy to carry; I finished it with an old translation from the Chicago Great Books series Mortimer Adler edited, taken from the Peterborough library’s basement storage—their newer copy was out. Except for the pure oddity of reading about “Prince Andrew” rather than “Andrei,” I found the change of translations an interestingly untroubling experience—the ideas, the human explorations and portraits, remained electrifying. On this reading, as opposed to the one undertaken at nineteen, even the didactic sections were magnetic, and his theory of history startlingly postmodern in the way he proposes it transcends theory itself. For Tolstoy, this leads to a proof of God’s existence—a conclusion from which I diverge—but the analysis is thrilling nonetheless, in its fidelity to the multiplicity of being. And Tolstoy’s compassion, his enormous capacity to name and encompass and include with warmth every facet of human behavior and feeling, is also something that I found breathes through yet independent of actual sentences. I doubt you could touch it if you took a sledgehammer to the words, that compassion is so strong.)

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (A book I have always meant to read but never had; after reading Coetzee’s magnificent and archetypal Waiting for the Barbarians a year or so ago, I wanted to read this book so clearly its forbear, but also because, as our country is so perilously considering at this time (it’s mid-September as I write this, and the polls show a Presidential race inexplicably close) what kind of future we—and the planet—will enter, I felt the necessity of reading a book so chastening, blistering, about what such choices truly mean.)

Doris Grumbach’s Chamber Music (A novel, but one that draws from the two foundation artist colonies in this country, MacDowell and Yaddo; I always like to read one book with an immediate connection to an artist colony while I’m in residence there.)

Donald Antrim’s The Afterlife: A Memoir (Donald was at MacDowell when I was, and read on his departure a rather brilliant story he’d just completed, his first new piece in three years; this is the book I’ve been saving for the plane ride home.)

Philip Roth, The Dying Animal (Someone had left this out on a table in the MacDowell library, and I’d recently read reviews of the new film based on it. Roth has lost none of his acuity as the chronicler of the contemporary American male, as viewed through the lens of eros.)

Magazines

I brought with me a large pile of unread back issues of The American Poetry Review and The Threepenny Review, and found innumerable treasures in each.

Boarding Call!