Customer Reviews

To Be the Poet (William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization)

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In this book, Maxine Hong Kingston proclaims to want to live the life of the poet. Working on her "longbook"--her thousand-plus page novel about Vietnam war veterans (her first novel since 1989's "Tripmaster Monkey")--has consumed so much of her life, creatively and otherwise, that she longs to live a poets life. The poets life, as she conceives it, is a life full of peace, surrounded by the most beautiful, beatific, awe-inspiring things. Instead of the arduousness of plots and stories, the brevity and aesthetic succinctness of poetry seems like a much more cozy alternative. Her enthusiasm for the poet's life is always near being tongue-in-cheek. A fellow poet reminds her that poets must revise, like novelists. Also, there's the sense that in arguing for poetry, she is arguing against it by claiming it to be like an aesthetic hit of crack--it's wonderful to experience in short and powerful bursts, then it goes away. So, perhaps, she ends up arguing for the novel ... it's hard to tell. Nevertheless, as she documents her poetry experiments, some nice lines and scenes emerge (particularly the last section of the book, "Spring Harvest," where she experiments with "four word poems"!). She also claims to close "To Be the Poet" with a poem (on Fa Mook Lan--another variation of the Fa Mu Lan myth, a la the "White Tigers" story in "The Woman Warrior") that will end her longbook. Kingston's poetry is hardly "strong" in the Harold Bloom sense but it is pleasant enough. But it leaves us longing even moreso for the "longbook."