“Oh! there are spirits of the air,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley. In this stunningly original book Maureen N. McLane channels the spirits and voices that make up the music in one poet’s mind. Weaving criticism and memoir, My Poets explores a life reading and a life read. McLane invokes in My Poets not necessarily the best poets, nor the most important poets (whoever these might be), but those writers who, in possessing her, made her. “I am marking here what most marked me,” she writes. Ranging from Chaucer to H.D. to William Carlos Williams to Louise Glück to Shelley (among others), McLane tracks the “growth of a poet’s mind,” as Wordsworth put it in The Prelude. In a poetical prose both probing and incantatory, McLane has written a radical book of experimental criticism. Susan Sontag called for an “erotics of interpretation”: this is it. Part Bildung, part dithyramb, part exegesis, My Poets extends an implicit invitation to you, dear reader, to consider who your “my poets,” or “my novelists,” or “my filmmakers,” or “my pop stars,” might be.
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Book Description
A thrillingly original exploration of a life lived under poetry’s uniquely seductive spell
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Editorial Reviews
From Bookforum
To read McLane is to be reminded that the brain may be an organ, but the mind is a muscle. [...] It's a visceral kind of criticism: sexy, strange, and suspenseful. — Parul Sehgal
Review
“To read McLane is to be reminded that the brain may be an organ, but the mind is a muscle. Hers is a roving, amphibious intelligence; she’s at home in the essay and the fragment, the polemic and the elegy. She can be confessional and clinical and ludic—sometimes all in the same sentence. What I’m trying to say is that McLane has moves. In her new book, My Poets, she invites us to read over her shoulder as she combs through ‘her’ poets, including Chaucer, H.D., Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Glück. It’s a work of personal and poetic archaeology . . . The prose is thick with quotation and self-interrogation . . . Forensically close readings dovetail with spirited defenses of the poets posterity has misunderstood, fresh readings of the familiar, and formal experiments . . . It’s a visceral kind of criticism, sexy, strange, suspenseful . . . Language enters McLane’s body like a current. Her whole body bucks and shudders. Her responses are forcefully somatic . . . and matched by the syntactical sophistication of her thought, her attraction to contradiction . . . McLane’s personality, her laconic wit and iconoclasm, suffuse this book . . . There is explicit autobiography here, too, painful self-disclosure, that gives the book its emotional torque . . . This isn’t the language of criticism; this is the language of seduction, a celebration of yearning, of not-knowing and not-having . . . Susan Sontag called for an erotics of art. My Poets is that more; it is an erotics of epistemology. A celebration of meaning and mystification, of the pleasures and necessity of kankedort. As McLane writes, ‘All honor to those who wave the pure flag of a difficult joy.’” —Parul Sehgal, Bookforum
“[A] beguiling new book . . . Genially, charismatically subversive . . . In this book McLane comes into contact—repeatedly, playfully, and with great seriousness—with verbal art, and is changed by it. My Poets is a delightful shock. It’s also a friendly book, inviting readers by its own example to let poems change them too . . . McLane recognizes that we all read with baggage. She reports on that baggage, miraculously without the cloistered narcissism typical of memoir. It’s part of this book’s strength, and its broad appeal, that McLane is willing to get personal while also tossing off niftily worded assessments of poems . . . My Poets is McLane’s story of learning to embrace the ambivalence of her own taste in poems and in people, and of learning to live and read in contradiction . . . Poetry clarifies our loneliness, restores textures to life’s flatness and abysses, makes the world bigger, and closer. Perhaps it makes us interesting, even beautiful, or anyway, human. McLane’s many dictions and registers, her playful digressions and pouncing aperçus, her fast foot-work that takes her from sorrow to arch amusement in half a sentence, work to demonstrate that.” —Daisy Fried, The New York Times Book Review
“Those seeking a critical introduction to Chaucer, Elizabeth Bishop, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H.D., Louise Glück, Fanny Howe, Dickinson or Shelley—Ms. McLane’s titular poets—will find something much more exhilarating . . . and impassioned. At a time when execrable “lyric essays” flourish as an excuse to avoid critical thinking, Ms. McLane has written lyrical essays that justify the genre . . . Ms. McLane’s discussions of her poets are interwoven with autobiographical accounts of what was going on in her life when she discovered them . . . she is able to elucidate why poetry can matter to a life without straining for the unconvincing uplift that mars so many books on poetry written for a general audience . . . [McLane] is clearly having fun . . . If you already love poetry, Ms. McLane’s book will rekindle old passions and ignite new ones. And if you don’t already love poetry, well, the central insight of My Poets, as of all literary criticism, is laid out in Ms. McLane’s chapter on ‘My Shelley / (My Romantics)’: ‘I had no imagination so I sought out the imaginers’ . . . There’s no way to convince a young person who doesn’t read that in order to have an imagination one must first seek out the imaginers, that without them a life is less. You can only place a book in her hands and hope for a spark. This book would do.” —Michael Robbins, The New York Observer
“Over the course of the 15 chapters of My Poets, McLane leads us (and herself) back down the paths she took to the poets and poems she loves, showing us where she stumbled along the way—and in doing so, authorizing us to trip and fall, too. (Or, perhaps, to veer off course entirely.) Throughout, McLane stays true to that proven tenet of poetic practice: Show, don’t tell . . . This isn’t just McLane clicking “Like” on a pantheon of poetry all-stars. These are her readings, her connections, her poets, and her weird, winding trail from one to the other . . . They highlight her impressive directness and clarity, her keen ear for language, and a deep well of memory . . . reading McLane’s readings is like following the faint lines of a crude map she drew as she forged intuitively along . . . One of the most enjoyable features of My Poets is the sheer agility of McLane’s poetic imagination, the ease with which one line awakens another . . . An invigorating mix of criticism, memoir, and marginalia from a writing life, My Poets wisely avoids slapping another sales pitch on poetry. If anything, McLane shows that poetry, and the wonders within, have been ours all along. She reminds us that poetry is bigger than all of us, yet exclusive to each of us; and that, when faced with a difficult poem, the reader’s role is never to tame it, but perhaps to simply heed some other wise words from Moore: ‘The thing is to see the vision and not deny it; to care and admit that we do.’” —Michael Andor Brodeur, The Boston Globe
“Throughout My Poets, her collection of beautiful, experimental essays, McLane's thinking through and appraising other poets is the central, commanding event . . . McLane's native attitude is soulful, metaphysical and witty . . . Together in the haze, McLane and her poets possess each other . . . thinking through these lines for meaning, syncopating confession with critique, McLane demonstrates across this gorgeous, humming collection, that we turn to poetry, as Dickinson sings, ‘To Keep the Dark away.’” —Walton Muyumba, NPR
“McLane is deliriously in love with poetry, and My Poets is an audacious, challenging, endearing work that defies all categorization . . . McLane’s spiky, precise prose veers, slips and blooms into poetry and back again. Her choices are self-declaredly personal and deeply idiosyncratic. Ranging widely over the English and American literary tradition, McLane underscores the arbitrariness of what in a writer strikes us, moves us, grips us, lingers with us . . . Like her beloved Dickinson, McLane is a fearless explorer of the ‘liminal zone’ in both life and art. Hers is a book about haunting, possession, and the fluidity of identity: ‘you are never sure what you might be made by.’ McLane makes herself vulnerable, again and again, to poetry’s surprising power and allows herself to be transformed, shaken up, transfigured by it . . . My Poets is at once an exuberant, even giddy, reveling in poetic fecundity and a carefully controlled and highly crafted analysis of individual poets and poems. Searching and at times sentimental but never wimpy, impassioned but never strident, it’s a little history not only of the growth of a poet’s mind but also of the shaping of a sensibility, an ethic and a character. And it’s a testament to the vital relevance of literature to our daily lives.” —Priscilla Gilman, The Chicago Tribune
“This is a vital, personal book about books, the idiosyncratic poetics of poets and poems. My Poets reminds us that the realm of letters remains a republic, in which the books we read tell the stories of our own lives . . . My Poets emphasizes its adjective and its noun alike. McLane offers openly—and brilliantly—what some critics refuse to admit: Her idiosyncrasies are her only way of reading, as mine are mine, yours yours.” —Dave Lucas, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
“[An] incandescent new collection of criticism . . . a book that may do more to change the way we think and write about poems than any since Paul Muldoon’s The End of the Poem . . . [A] willingness to let the heart lead the head (or sound lead sense) is a temperament that permeates McLane’s essays . . . The achievement of My Poets is the convincing case it makes that a reader’s real strength is her ability to cultivate an inconsistency of taste, which McLane argues is the inheritance of maturity. The goal is not to circle the square of one’s incongruities, but rather, when thinking alone will not bridge the partitioned self, to trust in feeling . . . My Poets is not just criticism, but art.” —Michael Lista, The National Post
“This is no layman’s guide to poetry. In this unusual book that can only be described as a love song—written in a jumpy yet satisfying mixture of prose criticism, memoir, anecdote, and imitative verse written in tribute—McLane, herself a poet and acclaimed critic of poetry, presents an esoteric tour of her personal pantheon, the poets that have shaped her life. McLane (World Enough) devotes a chapter to one or two...
“Over the course of the 15 chapters of My Poets, McLane leads us (and herself) back down the paths she took to the poets and poems she loves, showing us where she stumbled along the way—and in doing so, authorizing us to trip and fall, too. (Or, perhaps, to veer off course entirely.) Throughout, McLane stays true to that proven tenet of poetic practice: Show, don’t tell . . . This isn’t just McLane clicking “Like” on a pantheon of poetry all-stars. These are her readings, her connections, her poets, and her weird, winding trail from one to the other . . . They highlight her impressive directness and clarity, her keen ear for language, and a deep well of memory . . . reading McLane’s readings is like following the faint lines of a crude map she drew as she forged intuitively along . . . One of the most enjoyable features of My Poets is the sheer agility of McLane’s poetic imagination, the ease with which one line awakens another . . . An invigorating mix of criticism, memoir, and marginalia from a writing life, My Poets wisely avoids slapping another sales pitch on poetry. If anything, McLane shows that poetry, and the wonders within, have been ours all along. She reminds us that poetry is bigger than all of us, yet exclusive to each of us; and that, when faced with a difficult poem, the reader’s role is never to tame it, but perhaps to simply heed some other wise words from Moore: ‘The thing is to see the vision and not deny it; to care and admit that we do.’” —Michael Andor Brodeur, The Boston Globe
“Throughout My Poets, her collection of beautiful, experimental essays, McLane's thinking through and appraising other poets is the central, commanding event . . . McLane's native attitude is soulful, metaphysical and witty . . . Together in the haze, McLane and her poets possess each other . . . thinking through these lines for meaning, syncopating confession with critique, McLane demonstrates across this gorgeous, humming collection, that we turn to poetry, as Dickinson sings, ‘To Keep the Dark away.’” —Walton Muyumba, NPR
“McLane is deliriously in love with poetry, and My Poets is an audacious, challenging, endearing work that defies all categorization . . . McLane’s spiky, precise prose veers, slips and blooms into poetry and back again. Her choices are self-declaredly personal and deeply idiosyncratic. Ranging widely over the English and American literary tradition, McLane underscores the arbitrariness of what in a writer strikes us, moves us, grips us, lingers with us . . . Like her beloved Dickinson, McLane is a fearless explorer of the ‘liminal zone’ in both life and art. Hers is a book about haunting, possession, and the fluidity of identity: ‘you are never sure what you might be made by.’ McLane makes herself vulnerable, again and again, to poetry’s surprising power and allows herself to be transformed, shaken up, transfigured by it . . . My Poets is at once an exuberant, even giddy, reveling in poetic fecundity and a carefully controlled and highly crafted analysis of individual poets and poems. Searching and at times sentimental but never wimpy, impassioned but never strident, it’s a little history not only of the growth of a poet’s mind but also of the shaping of a sensibility, an ethic and a character. And it’s a testament to the vital relevance of literature to our daily lives.” —Priscilla Gilman, The Chicago Tribune
“This is a vital, personal book about books, the idiosyncratic poetics of poets and poems. My Poets reminds us that the realm of letters remains a republic, in which the books we read tell the stories of our own lives . . . My Poets emphasizes its adjective and its noun alike. McLane offers openly—and brilliantly—what some critics refuse to admit: Her idiosyncrasies are her only way of reading, as mine are mine, yours yours.” —Dave Lucas, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
“[An] incandescent new collection of criticism . . . a book that may do more to change the way we think and write about poems than any since Paul Muldoon’s The End of the Poem . . . [A] willingness to let the heart lead the head (or sound lead sense) is a temperament that permeates McLane’s essays . . . The achievement of My Poets is the convincing case it makes that a reader’s real strength is her ability to cultivate an inconsistency of taste, which McLane argues is the inheritance of maturity. The goal is not to circle the square of one’s incongruities, but rather, when thinking alone will not bridge the partitioned self, to trust in feeling . . . My Poets is not just criticism, but art.” —Michael Lista, The National Post
“This is no layman’s guide to poetry. In this unusual book that can only be described as a love song—written in a jumpy yet satisfying mixture of prose criticism, memoir, anecdote, and imitative verse written in tribute—McLane, herself a poet and acclaimed critic of poetry, presents an esoteric tour of her personal pantheon, the poets that have shaped her life. McLane (World Enough) devotes a chapter to one or two...
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
At times it was like crashing the gates of a private club or MFA Poetry program and reading bylaws meant for members only (more on that in a moment). And at times it was like reading someone's (OK, Maureen McLane's) thesis paper on this poet or that. And my, but McLane writes in a pretty how town way. Professorial stuff:
"Through Sappho she explored as well a kind of somatic poetics, a kind of sensually incarnational NOW." (Huh?)
"The vatic inward versus the detailed observed. The hieratic versus the potentially conversable." (Say wha-?)
"Much of the force of great modernist works arises from their desublimating impulse channeled into shatteringly, newly adequate forms..." (Again?)
Very impressive indeed, these $10 gibbers and $5 -ishes. I hadn't a clue, but I nodded at all the right moments. Some chapters dragged on forever. "My Marianne Moore and Moore and More and More and Will She Ever Stop?" That and one to "H.D." Hilda Doolittle? I'd never known this poet. I wear my ignorance on my sleeve but, deep in my vest, wanted to learn -- if only I could clear the vatic hurdles of incarnational, desublimating language.
In another chapter called "My Translated: An Abecedary," McLane deluges the reader with four pages of one liners, each saying things like "My Alcaeus is David A. Campbell," "My Akhmatova is Judith Hemschemeyer," "My Durs Grunbein is Michael Hofmann," "My Paul Muldoon is Paul Muldoon." Of course there are some poets the layreader will recognize, but they are few and far between, and seldom will many readers recognize both names in McLane's apparently clever pairs.
On and on it goes like an insider's wink, and I can't help but regret how this type of thing sets poetry back anew, perpetuating the belief that poetry is rarefied air meant only for rarefied lungs. It's as if McLane is signaling to others in her club, others who will recognize her each allusion and her every dropped historic and contemporary name, nodding knowingly like priests at a secret temple. Don't we put the eru- in -dite, the winks seem to say. We, the Keepers of Truth and Beauty in a great, unwashed world of bestseller-readers or (more horrifying still) TV-watchers and Youtube addicts.
Throughout the book lines of many poets are shared, though seldom in the entirety of the poem they are taken from. Often McLane tries some of her own poetry on for size. (It doesn't fit.) Some of the professional poems are in bold print, others in italics. Often I can't tell which line belongs to whom. Is this McLane? Is it the featured poet in question? Is it other poets brought in as background vocals for harmony?
But I liked OK the chapter (short) on Emily D., the Belle of Amherst. And the one on Shelley, too, but only because McLane talked mostly about his adolescent-like obsessions for free love or lust and half-priced revolutions, and not so much about his poetry. It's as if she took a wrong turn, found herself in the realm of biography, and the natives cheered.
Two of the chapters were found poems. Giant, 85-line poems, each line purloined from a poet's great work. It's a wonderful parlor game, but I wasn't about to trudge through all 85 lines in either case. Like excerpts from symphonies on public radio, all stitched together, it was. Gogol's overcoat, chapter and verse.
Marvelous moments, yes. Ambitious idea, surely. And I was grateful to catch glimpses of some lovely lines previously unknown. But, in the end, the book gets bogged down by too much ivory and too much tower. If you read poetry for a living and don't need a program guide (or an intermission) to get through such "learn'd astronomer's" thoughts as McLane's, you will certainly enjoy her book. Otherwise, pass. Hold tightly to what you already know and love about poems you've met and appreciated thus far in life.
And for heaven's sake, keep reading poetry.
"Through Sappho she explored as well a kind of somatic poetics, a kind of sensually incarnational NOW." (Huh?)
"The vatic inward versus the detailed observed. The hieratic versus the potentially conversable." (Say wha-?)
"Much of the force of great modernist works arises from their desublimating impulse channeled into shatteringly, newly adequate forms..." (Again?)
Very impressive indeed, these $10 gibbers and $5 -ishes. I hadn't a clue, but I nodded at all the right moments. Some chapters dragged on forever. "My Marianne Moore and Moore and More and More and Will She Ever Stop?" That and one to "H.D." Hilda Doolittle? I'd never known this poet. I wear my ignorance on my sleeve but, deep in my vest, wanted to learn -- if only I could clear the vatic hurdles of incarnational, desublimating language.
In another chapter called "My Translated: An Abecedary," McLane deluges the reader with four pages of one liners, each saying things like "My Alcaeus is David A. Campbell," "My Akhmatova is Judith Hemschemeyer," "My Durs Grunbein is Michael Hofmann," "My Paul Muldoon is Paul Muldoon." Of course there are some poets the layreader will recognize, but they are few and far between, and seldom will many readers recognize both names in McLane's apparently clever pairs.
On and on it goes like an insider's wink, and I can't help but regret how this type of thing sets poetry back anew, perpetuating the belief that poetry is rarefied air meant only for rarefied lungs. It's as if McLane is signaling to others in her club, others who will recognize her each allusion and her every dropped historic and contemporary name, nodding knowingly like priests at a secret temple. Don't we put the eru- in -dite, the winks seem to say. We, the Keepers of Truth and Beauty in a great, unwashed world of bestseller-readers or (more horrifying still) TV-watchers and Youtube addicts.
Throughout the book lines of many poets are shared, though seldom in the entirety of the poem they are taken from. Often McLane tries some of her own poetry on for size. (It doesn't fit.) Some of the professional poems are in bold print, others in italics. Often I can't tell which line belongs to whom. Is this McLane? Is it the featured poet in question? Is it other poets brought in as background vocals for harmony?
But I liked OK the chapter (short) on Emily D., the Belle of Amherst. And the one on Shelley, too, but only because McLane talked mostly about his adolescent-like obsessions for free love or lust and half-priced revolutions, and not so much about his poetry. It's as if she took a wrong turn, found herself in the realm of biography, and the natives cheered.
Two of the chapters were found poems. Giant, 85-line poems, each line purloined from a poet's great work. It's a wonderful parlor game, but I wasn't about to trudge through all 85 lines in either case. Like excerpts from symphonies on public radio, all stitched together, it was. Gogol's overcoat, chapter and verse.
Marvelous moments, yes. Ambitious idea, surely. And I was grateful to catch glimpses of some lovely lines previously unknown. But, in the end, the book gets bogged down by too much ivory and too much tower. If you read poetry for a living and don't need a program guide (or an intermission) to get through such "learn'd astronomer's" thoughts as McLane's, you will certainly enjoy her book. Otherwise, pass. Hold tightly to what you already know and love about poems you've met and appreciated thus far in life.
And for heaven's sake, keep reading poetry.
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book of the synergy between poet, poem, and reader [Highly Recommended]
June 21, 2012
Format:Hardcover
McLane's book is an archaeology of the self -- through the materials of poetry. She examines her changing response to the same lines. She is conscious that a critic does not have an objective perspective, but one that is dynamic, shifting, and vulnerable. She looks at poetry as biographical meaning. She is not concerned for the poem alone, but who the poet is through the poem. Digging into her past, into the love and loss of a woman, she allows the memories and lost presence to suffuse everything.
This book reminds us that verse is not meant to be read... it is meant to be lived. That poetry is only rewarding, sometimes, when truly difficult -- that is, when the reader overcomes herself, to meet the poem as poet-in-poem. As McLane shows, when the reader accomplishes this, her own life will paradoxically enliven and inform the poem with her own breath and memories. But at this point, the reader has gone beyond simple associations. She has reached the life- and poetry-defining point of deep readership.
Whether you're the type who enjoys word and language manipulation yourself, a la Parlett's THE Book of Word Games -- or you prefer to watch expert world-bending in action, a la Borges' Labyrinths, you will find yourself in good company here.
This book reminds us that verse is not meant to be read... it is meant to be lived. That poetry is only rewarding, sometimes, when truly difficult -- that is, when the reader overcomes herself, to meet the poem as poet-in-poem. As McLane shows, when the reader accomplishes this, her own life will paradoxically enliven and inform the poem with her own breath and memories. But at this point, the reader has gone beyond simple associations. She has reached the life- and poetry-defining point of deep readership.
Whether you're the type who enjoys word and language manipulation yourself, a la Parlett's THE Book of Word Games -- or you prefer to watch expert world-bending in action, a la Borges' Labyrinths, you will find yourself in good company here.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By lucretia
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
The poet, Maueen McLane, writes of her visceral responses to various poems and includes some "found" poems of her own. This is a remarkable, moving book. Would that poetry were taught this way in schools. Everyone would read it.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
An informed and eloquent testimonial
This is a testimonial to the poets who have influenced the writer, herself a fine practitioner of the craft. It is a personal book. Read more
Published 2 months ago by James M. Cronin
5.0 out of 5 stars
Magic of language
I must admit, I don't understand the anger of one reviewer at what he views as exclusionary language in Maureen McLane's "My Poets" -- that's like playing tennis with Serena... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Patricia Norton
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