Let me tell you something about children’s poetry: people tend to create it for the right reasons. I was taught this concept in connection to medieval lyric poetry. My teacher’s point was that art made in the modern world is under scarcely any obligation to be good. It can be interesting instead, or new. Or it can “bear witness.” Being good—actually good—is even considered a little passé.

The minute you bring a six-year-old into the picture, though, everything changes. She doesn’t care whether what you’re doing “serves as a useful critique.” She wants it to be good. Consequently, if I’m in a used bookstore and I see a book called Thai Children’s Poetry or Setswana Children’s Poetry or Inuit Children’s Poetry, I pretty much buy it on contact. One wants to know: Does Botswana have a Dr. Seuss? Does Thailand? ’Cuz if they do, I need to know about it.

Russia had a Dr. Seuss. Same deal as ours, except his hot decade wasn’t the fifties; it was the twenties. There’s a lot to be said here.

Name: Kornei Chukovsky. Dates: 1882 to 1969. Number of supremo-supremo classic children’s books to his credit: ten or twelve. His stuff is a lot like Green Eggs and Ham: about that long; rhymes bouncing around like popcorn; no real point in sight. (Of course, like with everything else, you can carry whatever point you like into his books and then pretend you found it there. It’s like cops planting weed in people’s cars.)

Chukovsky’s backstory is pleasant. He was a young father; his son was sick. I think he had dysentery, I’m not sure. Somehow, everyone thought the family doctor was the only one would could be consulted, so Chukovsky wound up on a train in the middle of the night with that poor kid, age like four or something, sick and moaning. To take the kid’s mind off the horribleness, Chukovsky got him engrossed in some kind of collaborative improvisation game, rhyming like crazy around a story of a crocodile who comes to Saint Petersburg and eats a dog and then a cop or something… there’s a war … the crocodile runs around … Chukovsky’s kid was just a teeny thing, but he knew inspiration when he saw it. He forgot all about his guts and helped Mozart compose his first symphony.

Next day, the two of ’em knew that what they’d made was too good to let go off, so they sat at a table and reconstructed what they could. Chukovsky took that reconstruction, fixed it up, made it make sense, and voilà: ready for the printer. I’m doing all this from memory.

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Harry Mathews. Photo: Curt Richter.

There are two ways, at least, into “Cool gales shall fan the glade,” the last poem Harry Mathews completed and the first one included in Harry Mathews Collected Poems: 1946–2016. One is to read it as a twilight soliloquy: a wandering rumination on a long life richly lived, filled with loves and lusts and leisure and loss, shaped by many wandering ruminations before this one. Another is to read it as an experiment on a French fixed form from the fourteenth century called the sestina, with the supplemental rule that the words concluding each line, instead of merely repeating in spiraling permutation, add a letter and rearrange themselves into new words with every stanza: at becomes fat becomes fast becomes feast. These two ways are not mutually exclusive, I don’t think; perhaps, to hear Harry Mathews in the poem as I hear him, it is necessary to travel both at once.

This is to say that I read Harry Mathews as uniting the liberation of rules with the discipline of desire, much as Raymond Queneau once praised Raymond Roussel for uniting the madness of the mathematician with the rationality of the poet. If I prize this sense of poles joined, of apparent contradictions reconciled, over other approaches to his writing, it’s because it was under the sway of those Raymonds—both of whom bore an outsize influence on Harry’s life and work—that I became a Mathews reader in the first place. I came to the Oulipo, the Parisian atelier of literary mischief that Queneau cofounded in 1960 and in which Harry planted an American flag in 1973, enchanted by its committed exploration of form and procedure, its willingness to find poetic potential in the unsentimental machinery of language. But in Harry’s work, first his eloquently hallucinatory novels and then his essays and poems and translations, I found that not even the resolute embrace of empirical constraint repressed this aura of lusty, extravagant, insatiably curious humanity. A throw of the dice, to paraphrase Mallarmé, never seemed to abolish that fetching madness. Read More

This Valentine’s Day, we bring you a bit of turn-of-the-century breakup slang.

Postcard, originally mailed in Michigan on February 13, 1909

Back when my husband was my boyfriend, he mentioned an antique postcard that he’d picked up and mailed to his parents. On it, a man’s outreached hands held green and yellow oviform fruits; the type read “A Lime and a Lemon With My Compliments.” Andy didn’t quite understand the card, he told me, but it had amused him, and he wondered what had become of it.

That was early in our relationship. I was eager to be lovable. Shopping eBay for another copy for him, I scored two, both showing a crateful of citrus. “This Box of Oranges, with my Compliments, from Florida,” went one; “This Box of Grape-Fruit With My Compliments From Florida,” went the other. I’m from Florida, so the postcards were on-target, and next visit home I sent them out to desired effect. Vitamin C protects the body against scurvy—that was the meaning in my mind. You offered lemons to people you approved of to keep them prime.

Neither of us yet knew the true meaning behind the phrase “handed a lemon.”

Recently, I bought Andy a manual citrus press, and went back online to find a vintage postcard to accompany the present. That’s where it all began.

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Adrienne Miller was the literary and fiction editor of Esquire from 1997 to 2006.

Berthold Woltze, Der lästige Kavalier (The Irritating Gentleman), 1874, oil on canvas, 29 1/2 x 22 1/2″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A man said to me, “I’ve always wondered why it is that your sisters aren’t better writers.”

A man asked me, when discussing the work of a female author, “Is she a ‘big’ girl?”

A man asked, “Why is there always a scene in every women’s novel with a female character making snow angels?”

A man asked me why it was that women writers seemed to be capable of only two things: sensation on one hand or attitudinizing on the other.

A man told me that he didn’t believe I’d read enough books to be able to do my job effectively. Read More

Eileen Power, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Virginia Woolf

When the visiting bishop arrives to inspect the ramshackle convent in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1948 novel The Corner That Held Them, he is distressed to find unmistakable evidence of unchaste activities. Instead of being greeted by peals of holy music, “his hearing had been tormented by the yelpings of little dogs and the clatterings of egg-whisks.” He finds the nuns devouring sweets in the dormitories, keeping pets, lounging on soft cushions; they wear perfumed mantles “better befitting harlots than the brides of Christ”; and this devout sisterhood appears to be “bristling with quarrels and slanders.” He considers that a household of nuns might be forgiven for careless stewardship of their financial assets, “since women are ordained the weaker vessel and have no business sense.” But when these natural infirmities are not compensated for by piety and devotion, this, concludes the disappointed bishop, is true depravity.

“A good convent,” writes Warner with knowing irony, “should have no history. Its life is hid with Christ who is above. History is of the world, costly and deadly.” The novel—which covers three centuries in the life of Oby, a small Norfolk parish—presents the humdrum minutiae of daily happenings, too insignificant (and worldly) to be recorded on the expensive vellum of medieval chronicles but making up the lives of the generations of unsung women who pass through these cloisters: the shard of eggshell found in a pancake, ants marching through the larder, intrigue over priory elections, and long nights spent in the treasury poring over accounts. The convent was founded in commemoration of a twelfth-century adulteress by a stern husband, eager that history should forget her ancient passion (now masked effectively by an ugly stone effigy), and dedicated to the patron saint of prisoners. As the nuns, bored at prayer, count up the women who have died in the convent before them, they know that their duty is to act as a group (“a flock soberly ascending to a heavenly pasture”) and retain a decorous anonymity. In any case, they see few opportunities to leave a mark on history. With the convent in the grip of poverty and all energies expended on attempts to balance revenues with expenditures, “there was no place for aberrations of individuality.” “In songs and romances,” writes Warner, “an apostate nun may be a romantic figure. God’s Mother becomes her proxy in the convent and pins up the curtain before her frailties; but in real life she is a drab like any other drab, nursing her baby and eyeing her lover and the tankards from the tavern doorway.”

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,” wrote Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1929). In that essay, commenting on the fact that women’s lives are “all but absent from history,” she argues that this is not only a consequence of the ways women have been deprived of the material conditions under which their talents can prosper but also reveals the sort of events and lives historians have traditionally considered worth remembering—primarily, the public activities of “great men.” Perusing the index of G. M. Trevelyan’s History of England, Woolf looks up “position of women” and is dismayed to find only a smattering of references, mostly to customs of arranged marriage, wife-beating, and the fictional heroines of Shakespeare. Flicking through chapters on wars and kings, she wonders why so little room is left for women’s activities in the events that “constitute this historian’s view of the past.” It was clear to Woolf that new histories were needed, which would examine the reality of women’s lives, their relationships and activities, and the forces that thwarted their ambitions. In the last year of her life, Woolf began work on a history of English literature that would uncover a range of “anonymous” voices from the past. As bombers zipped low over her Sussex home, Woolf immersed herself in reading about witches, nuns, poets, actresses, servants, and governesses, eager to draw these “lives of the obscure” together in an alternative portrait of English society, which would expose the way history was constructed and the voices it excluded. Looking for erudite, imaginative history writing that performed a similar excavation, she reread the very book to which Warner would turn a few years later when composing The Corner That Held Them: an imposing seven-hundred-page tome titled Medieval English Nunneries, by a young economic historian named Eileen Power.

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It has often been my experience that rereading a book that was important to me at earlier times in my life is something like lying on the analyst’s couch. The narrative I have had by heart for years is suddenly being called into alarming question. It seems that I’ve misremembered quite a lot about this or that character, or this or that plot turn—they met here in New York, I was so sure it was Rome; the time was 1870, I thought it was 1900; and the mother did what to the protagonist? Yet the world still drops away while I’m reading and I can’t help marveling, If I got this wrong, and this and this wrong, how come the book still has me in its grip?

Like most readers, I sometimes think I was born reading. I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me. On vacation with family or friends, I am quite capable of settling myself, book in hand, on the living room couch in a beautiful country house and hardly stirring out into the glorious green for which we have all come. Once, on a train going through the Peruvian Andes, with everyone else ooh-ing and aah-ing out the window, I couldn’t lift my eyes from The Woman in White. On a Caribbean beach I sat in the blazing sun, Diane Johnson’s Lesser Lives (an imagined biography of George Meredith’s first wife) propped on my knees, and was surprised when I looked up to see that I wasn’t surrounded by the fog and cold of 1840s England. The companionate-ness of those books! Of all books. Nothing can match it. It’s the longing for coherence inscribed in the work—that extraordinary attempt at shaping the inchoate through words—it brings peace and excitement, comfort and consolation. But above all, it’s the sheer relief from the chaos in the head that reading delivers. Sometimes I think it alone provides me with courage for life, and has from earliest childhood. Read More