Politics & Prose (& Poetry)

I read this afternoon at my all-time favorite bookstore in DC, Politics & Prose. After the event, J (who was able to escape work for a quick weekend before heading back underway), bought me a little present: Valzhyna Mort's Factory of Tears. The collection, a bilingual edition (English/Belarusian) published by Copper Canyon, has the perfect Red Army Red cover. A sad looking tablecloth, a pathetic white enamel teapot. And the poems have titles like "The Polish Immigrants," "Berlin-Minsk," and "Promised Land." You can read one of Mort's poems here at the Poetry Foundation's website.

Sometimes, when I'm working intently on a project, it begins to seem as if the whole world is pointing me toward new sources of information, new ideas. Years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I wrote my senior thesis on The Scarlet Letter, reading the novel as an explanation for the way in which artists are made (I called the essay "A Is for Artist"). At the time, every conversation, every dream or nightmare, every commercial on TV seemed to tell me something more about Hester Prynne. Maybe it was delusion, or maybe this simply how the focused mind discovers its subject.

Now, as I write these poems about Communist kitsch and the tyranny of adolescence, the world is showing me my subject again. I find Valzhyna Mort's Factory of Tears on a bookshelf in Washington, DC. I discover Eleanor Lerman's "Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds," through an accident of hyperlinks. And, during my summer visit to NYC, I see the perfect scholarly text on the highest shelf of a lovely store. If I keep writing and reading, the world will me other poems that need writing and other books that I should read.