The Good Stuff

Spring shows up like Rilke

Hi, Friend.

Spring has arrived in Ohio with its beauty and terror (how Rilkean of it!)—tornados, thunder and lightning, and hail, but also magnolia blossoms, acid-yellow forsythia bushes, rippling clouds, and copper-bellied robins singing. If you read my earlier dispatch from my happy place, you can guess I’m letting the Merlin app pick up bird songs on my walks and tell me what I’m hearing. I already know the calls of House Sparrows, Common Grackles, and Blue Jays, but the Cedar Waxwing? The White-breasted Nuthatch? The Tufted Titmouse? New to me!

And yes, when I excitedly shout, “A Dark-eyed Junco!” while looking down at my phone, my kids roll their eyes and walk faster to escape me. I am a hopeless nerd.

I hope spring is bringing plenty of beauty emergencies and new surprises your way, too. We need them.

We also need poems, like this new beauty by Susan Aizenberg in Plume.

I’ve been listening to music less on walks so that I can hear and identify the birds (cough*NERD*cough), but I’m really excited for the new Waxahatchee record, Tigers Blood, which comes out March 22. (Her last record, Saint Cloud, was PERFECT. A perfect record, period.)

I’m also listening to a lot of World Party, since we just lost Karl Wallinger. Goodbye Jumbo is my most-listened-to record of theirs, but as a song, “Ship of Fools” from Private Revolution is my favorite. I’ve loved that song since I was my son’s age, and it’s always in the rotation at our house.

Next month my youngest sister, my brother-in-law, and I are going to see Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service play Transatlanticism and Give Up—both records in their entirety, with special guest Jenny Lewis, who sings on that terrific Postal Service record. I avoid ginormous arena shows as a general rule, but I can’t wait for this one. (I saw Feist and Bon Iver several years ago in the same arena, and it was overwhelming but wonderful.)

The book I was most excited to get my hands on this month was Diane Seuss’s new collection, Modern Poetry. IT IS SO GOOD. Her last book, frank: sonnets, won the Pulitzer Prize, and she’s not letting up with this new book. Not one bit. I’m also gobbling up all of the brilliant, no-bullshit interviews she’s been doing about the book. This one was a favorite of mine, and I ended up sending it to a few students who I know are fans of her work. Here’s a bit of it:

Diane Seuss: I’m frustrated when I hear conversations around diversity with no mention of the powerful impact of class, poverty, work, on every aspect of the poem. On voice, on access, and on nuances of understanding. The MFA can be a very valuable and supportive experience for writers, but one has to be careful of becoming a product of a hermetic system. It’s important to retain your quirks. For instance—where are you from, and what landscape made you?

William Lessard: Well, I’m a guy from the Bronx, hence the accent.

DS: I was raised in the middle of rural Michigan. Not in the middle, at the bottom of rural Michigan. I’d never heard of a poetry reading or an editor or an older writer I might learn from, until my mentor found me, in a profound act of serendipity. But that place had other things. Thank God for the things it had. Some of it was really crappy, but some of it fed my imagination in a way I don’t think even other kinds of access could have provided. It’s probably best that I didn’t have access. That’s just speaking for me, from my own experience.

WL: In popular culture, working-class life is populated with all these broken people and trauma. Yes, it is all that, but it’s a lot of fun, too.

DS: I don’t know that I’ve fully gotten to it in any of my books. Yes, there is obviously a provincialism or a narrowness of experience, but there’s also a kind of wildness that you just don’t get anywhere else. I don’t know how to fully explain it to people.

Another favorite online read was this conversation between Lyz Lenz and Virginia Sole-Smith (which you can read or listen to in podcast form). Lyz’s new book, This American Ex-Wife, is a New York Times bestseller for good reason. Whew.

I also spoke to Lyz for her This American Ex-Wife podcast a couple of months ago.

I recently had a great chat with Katherine May for her book club. From Katherine, who’s as brilliant and genuine as they come:

I am in awe of Maggie Smith’s memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, for what she is willing to show us. Yes, the writing is keen and gorgeous, and yes, she tells us a hundred truths in every chapter, but most of all she allows us to witness a self crumbling, scattering and renewing. She takes us to a place that many of us fear to even imagine, and allows us to watch the rearrangement that happens in slow time. We live through the recursive raging fury of it all, the hurt, the fear, and we are allowed to feel the shift that comes - eventually - when this new identity settles into itself and starts gazing around, awed by the world again.

If you aren’t yet a subscriber to Katherine’s Substack newsletter, The Clearing, check it out. It’s a favorite of mine.

It’s spring break here this week, and we’re staying put here in Columbus. The kids are hanging out with friends, but we’re also trying to plan plenty of little things for fun: Columbus Crew games, IKEA, Old Man’s Cave, Starliner Diner (the plaintainssssssss), German Village (Katzinger’s Deli, Pistachia Vera, the Book Loft, Schiller Park). And I want to try Woodhouse in the Short North—a vegan place I haven’t been to yet—and then walk over to the North Market and maybe hit a couple of thrift stores. We’ll see. We may go bowling if we have a particularly chilly day, knowing I’ll endlessly and annoyingly quote The Big Lebowski and we’ll crack up the whole time.

On my flight to AWP last month, a solid pairing: The Big Lebowski with a complimentary gin & tonic. No notes.

My next work trip is in April, where I’ll be appearing at a fundraiser for the National Poetry Series in St. Louis, with Natasha Trethewey, Michael Cunningham, Imani Perry, and Shangri-La Hou, one of five National Student Poets for 2023-2024. Moderator Imani Perry “will lead a conversation about language and the impact of poetry in keeping language alive.” I’m really looking forward to it. I hope you’ll consider joining us, if this is your neck of the woods.

What’s spring like where you are? What’s bringing you joy these days?

Wishing you more of it—
Maggie