Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Reading Fiction

"Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt even just a teensy bit guilty for carving precious time out of your busy, full life to dive into a book and relish a made-up story."  — Holly Parker, Ph.D, in Psychology Today

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Illustrationen: John Tenniel

“It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

 — James Baldwin

"Fiction that adds up, that suggests a ‘logical consistency,’ or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.” 

— Joyce Carol Oates

“The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.” 
— Gustave Flaubert

Captivated by Adolphe Alexandre Lesrel 

Midweek Motif ~ Reading Fiction

What happens when you read fiction?  Does it seem more a physical, intellectual, emotional or spiritual engagement?

Or don't you read it? 

Some say it distracts us from a true path, but others believe with Ralph Waldo Emerson that "Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures." 

Your challenge:  Write a new poem with "reading fiction" as topic and/or motif.

The Novel Reader by Vincent van Gogh (1888)

The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm 

BY WALLACE STEVENS

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be

The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:

The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,

In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

How Reading Fiction Books Can Change You

The Land of Story-books

by Robert Louis Stevenson

At evening when the lamp is lit,

Around the fire my parents sit;

They sit at home and talk and sing,

And do not play at anything.

Now, with my little gun, I crawl

Away behind the sofa back.

All in the dark along the wall,

And follow round the forest track

And play at books that I have read

There, in the night, where none can spy,

All in my hunter’s camp I lie,

The roaring lions come to drink.

Till it is time to go to bed. 

These are the hills, these are the woods,

These are my starry solitudes;

I see the others far away

And there the river by whose brink 

Home I return across the sea,

As if in firelit camp they lay,

And I, like to an Indian scout,

Around their party prowled about.

So, when my nurse comes in for me,

At my dear land of Story-books.

And go to bed with backward looks

There is no frigate like a book (1263)

by Emily Dickinson

There is no Frigate like a Book 

To take us Lands away, 

Nor any Coursers like a Page 

Of prancing Poetry – 

This Traverse may the poorest take 

Without oppress of Toll – 

How frugal is the Chariot

That bears a Human soul.

Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community.   
 (Next week Sumana’s Midweek Motif will be ~ Ode to Age.)

I Wish I'd Written This

But I, Too, Want To Be a Poet

By Fanny Howe 

But I, too, want to be a poet

and live a virtuous life

To erase from my days

confusion & poverty

fiction & a sharp tongue!

To sing again

with the tones of adolescence

demanding vengeance

against my enemies, with words

clear & austere

To end this tumultuous quest

for reasonable solutions

to situations mysterious & sore

To have the height to view

myself as I view others

with lenience and love

To be free of the need

to make a waste of money

when my passion,

first and last,

is for the ecstatic lash

of the poetic line

and no visible recompense.

Stop me if you've heard this one! Apparently it is well-known, which is not surprising. I'm sure many poets feel Howe speaks for them.

It must be a bit tongue in cheek, surely? She IS a poet! Or is she being sarcastic, poking fun at idealistic notions of what a poet is or should be? Or, does she express her own simple truth? Possibly all of the above simultaneously.

'Visible recompense' is something we'd all like, isn't it? But to be freed of the need for it — ah, what freedom that would be! To be able to devote oneself to one's poetic art, for its own sake....

I'd like to have written some of those excellent phrases. I look for some to quote here as examples, and find the whole poem is a series of them! It is hard to separate any from the others — except of course the most arresting and goose-bumpy of the lot: 'the ecstatic lash / of the poetic line'. How I'd love to have written that!

Fanny Howe is a prolific, prize-winning poet. Her Amazon page is actually three pages. The Poetry Foundation gives a brief, literary biography and several of her poems. Wikipedia fleshes out the information a bit more. She is also a novelist and short story writer, married to a poet and writer, and the mother of three adult children, one of whom is himself a novelist.

Here are a number of links to her reading her poetry, on YouTube and other places. Enjoy!

Poems and photos used in ‘I Wish I’d Written This’ remain the property of the copyright holders (usually their authors).