I selected two books. The first was the new Michael Lewis book, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood. Lewis is best known for writing about business and baseball, but he's also a native New Orleanian. (He attended the prep school Isidore Newman.) His new book is about navigating the rocky shoals of contemporary fatherhood. This normally would not be my cup of tea, but Lewis is one of the few living writers who makes me laugh out loud, so I picked it up. Gen Xers will appreciate that his wife is Tabitha Soren, formerly of MTV News. So far, it's a funny, light, sweet book. We'll see if it gets deeper as I approach the finish.
The other book was a bit more meaty: A lovely, small hardcover of Walt Whitman poetry from Everyman's Library. I picked it because it included the poem "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing." Here is the full text for your reading enjoyment. I think he really captures the majestic beauty of the trees, which have a meditative effect on me as well:
I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it and
twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana
solitary in a wide in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.
2 comments:
I love this Whitman poem. I think people tend to think of Whitman as bombastic, but, actually, he writes about weighty subjects with a very delicate hand.
I think he's definitely an underrated poet who I would like to spend more time with ... I know it sounds weird to call him underrated. He's Walt Whitman, for pete's sake! But it seems he doesn't get the respect he deserves in some way, hard to put my finger on it exactly. I'll think more on this. Meanwhile, I'm crafting a new blog post in my head switching my poetic allegiance from T.S. Eliot to W.B. Yeats. Yeats is my new favorite poet.
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