A subscriber to this magazine writes with a problem: “Although I have advanced university degrees, I have never ‘gotten’ poetry.” He’s not alone; I hear the same thing regularly from people who love to read novels and biographies, who are undaunted by string quartets and abstract paintings, but find poetry a closed door. No one is more aware of this disconnect between poetry and the reading public than poets themselves. The debate over why poetry moved from the center of literary culture to the outskirts of the academy, and how it can regain its place in the sun, has been going on at least since Dana Gioia’s landmark essay “Can Poetry Matter?” appeared in The Atlantic in 1991. More recently, the poet and novelist Ben Lerner devoted a short book to explaining The Hatred of Poetry. The poet-critic Stephanie Burt, perhaps taking that hatred for granted, titled a book about how to read poems Don’t Read Poetry.
Both are puzzles with particular rules and constraints: translators move the meaning and culture of a text from one language into another, and cruciverbalists populate grids with words that translate into a set of clues. When I translate poems and construct crosswords, I often find myself asking the same questions: What does this word mean? Will others understand? And, of course, how can I have fun with this?
Loftus, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, is the most influential female psychologist of the twentieth century, according to a list compiled by the Review of General Psychology. Her work helped usher in a paradigm shift, rendering obsolete the archival model of memory—the idea, dominant for much of the twentieth century, that our memories exist in some sort of mental library, as literal representations of past events. According to Loftus, who has published twenty-four books and more than six hundred papers, memories are reconstructed, not replayed. “Our representation of the past takes on a living, shifting reality,” she has written. “It is not fixed and immutable, not a place way back there that is preserved in stone, but a living thing that changes shape, expands, shrinks, and expands again, an amoeba-like creature.”
Writing about music is tremendously hard. Writing about fictional music is surely even harder — but with artful juxtaposition and Zelig-like placement of made-up characters with real ones (Dick Cavett!), the author has conjured an entire oeuvre of lyrics, licks and liner notes that is backdrop for some of the most pressing political issues of our era, or any era. The story Sunny “tells” using the tools of journalism is propulsive, often funny and thought-provoking. Like the best fiction, it feels truer and more mesmerizing than some true stories. It’s a packed time capsule that doubles as a stick of dynamite.
Thompson approaches identity in a nuanced and complex manner, and the inner turmoil of his very contemporary characters can’t be reduced to simplistic polarities. Thompson explores tensions underlying everyday conversations between colleagues, extraordinary disputes between school children and teachers, and unexceptional fights between estranged brothers with insight and acuity, revealing the hidden strains that imbue these interactions.
The passion Weidensaul brings to these scenes is personal. “A World on the Wing” finds some of its most moving moments early on, when he charts the development of his own interest in birds. As he describes watching the great movements of raptors over Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania, “fly-fishing in the air” to lure a golden eagle into his bander’s mist net, or the simple pleasure of celebrating the raucous arrival of Canada geese every spring over his childhood home (“Big Goose Day” his family called it; “but it’s not like we baked a cake or anything,” his sister adds), a birder can be forgiven for nodding in recognition. And non-birders can feel enough of the joy that they too might be inspired to partake of the wild.
I’m not a birder, but Weidensaul persuades me that I could be, and that a greater appreciation of the movement and behaviour of migratory birds might bring me into closer contact with what it means to be a living thing on Earth. How is it that these animals, even at a first attempt, can navigate a hemisphere with such unreal precision? The answer, as Weidensaul relates, might lie in the phenomenon of quantum entanglement with the planet, as wavelengths of blue light excite and split electrons between the eye of the bird and the air they cut through – electron pairs that remain connected, in spite of distance, creating a map of the world in the eye of the bird.