What One Girl Knows

This is the book of poetry I am currently reading. It's The Saint of Burning Down (an excellent title, in my opinion) by Nicole Cuddeback, who coincidentally is a SLC alum. I go through strange, smallish fits of poetry reading because A) I feel poetry is good for me, and B) it is a genre I often find myself reluctant to read. For one thing, I'm still not sure I know how to read a poem. Because I am a writer, I appreciate language, and I often enjoy provocative, particularly well-crafted lines or even stanzas. But I am also an impatient reader, a speed-reader from early childhood. I cannot just stop at one poem, put the collection down, and let my mind percolate on it for a while. No, I have to read through five or six poems, until themes and images are mangled and merged, until I am (usually) entirely confused.

You would think that having a poet boyfriend would remedy my poetry-phobia, but so far that hasn't been the case. Jason occasionally spoon-feeds me a poem: a Levine here or there, a Lorca or Neruda. But more often than not, he's also reading fiction -- he's particularly fond of Latin-American novels.

I am halfway through The Saint of Burning Down, and find my reading experience to be pretty much the same as always. There are a few images so beautiful I had to write them down (for example: "blue shoots of ink bloom on the right hand"), but I've read all of them too quickly, and some of the poems veer a little close to language poetry (which aren't supposed to comprehendable anyway, right?). Blah.