books 2007: Erotikon, by Susan Mitchell

[supercheesegirl]

I actually read this last month. I didn't like it, and it came so highly recommended that I thought I was probably in the wrong for not liking it, and I resolved to read it again just to make sure. I got part way through it a second time, liked it a little better, but still couldn't get motivated enough to keep reading it. Now it is due back at the library, and I think that I will continue not being motivated enough to keep reading it.

I don't know, I loved Susan Mitchell's book Rapture, which I read in college. She seems almost like an entirely different poet in Erotikon, though. Are there two poets named Susan Mitchell? No, the cover of Erotikon clearly states that she also wrote Rapture. I don't know, there were parts of it I liked. The words sound really beautiful together, but I was having difficulty finding the meaning in the sounds. A line like "Crepuscular scatterings, great solifluctions" (p. 7)--I'm sorry, but that means nothing to me. I don't read poetry to learn new words, no matter how cool they sound. I get to a line like that (and there were many, like that, throughout the book) and it just loses me. I am lost, I would like a map to your poem. But there were passages that were very beautiful, and almost comprehensible. Starting it a second time, I was feeling like I was on the edge of actually understanding. Overall, though, I was disappointed, because this was supposed to be sexy poetry, and I couldn't tell if it was or not, and that made me disappointed in myself as a reader, and that made me dislike the book even more. Sigh.

Comments

Nasty Parody!

[amedia.livejournal.com]

Rapture pissed me off for similar reasons when I read it, although I mellowed a bit when TODS and I discussed the poems that he focused on in his section of L&C - he had dug out a lot of really good meaning and wordplay & whatnot.

Before I mellowed, though, I had written this:

Let me tell you about
Myself, the way I write. I've learned
a chatty style can be disguised
as deep and significant poetry
by the simple application of occasional
sesquipedalian pedantry - a smokescreen of erudition
to send the audience scuttling for the dictionary,
convinced I must be good because they can't
understand me. In the same way I make frequent use of
anacolouthon - to say nothing of bad metaphors,
obscurum per obscurior, to drive home the lesson
that my feelings are original and ineffable and cannot
be expressed in any language, and that my ego
is such that I believe you will cough up
fourteen dollars to hear me
say so.