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As a few of you may recall, I am an unapologetic lover of haiku. Nothing irritates me more than anti-haiku snobbery among the literati (while I freely admit there are plenty of awful poems in this form, just as in any other variety of poetry you care to name). My favorite collections of the year were Jack Kerouac's Book of Haikus (Penguin) and Haiku, selected and edited by Peter Williams for Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series (Knopf). Here are some of the ones I like best from Kerouac: "The smoke of old / naval battles / Is gone." "Missing a kick / at the icebox door / It closed anyway." (Williams includes that one as well.) And: "Run over by my lawnmower, / waiting for me to leave, / The frog." Speaking of haiku I'm reminded of a wonderful collection of found poetry, Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld, compiled and edited by Hart Seely (Free Press). People who can't stand Rumsfeld—and they are legion—apparently found it a hoot. I am not of that camp, yet still I enjoyed this little book mightily. There's something uncanny as well as funny about the effects of language lifted out of its context for our inspection.
Roy Sorenson's A Brief History of the Paradox: Philosophy and the Labyrinths of the Mind (Oxford) was one of the most enjoyable books I read this past year, though I don't share Sorenson's conception of philosophy. To fully appreciate the book—and to adequately assess it—you would need to be a philosopher, which I am not. But for general readers with a strong interest in philosophy, it's an unbeatable bedside book, witty and stimulating if taken in small doses. (More technical, less entertaining, but lucid is Nicholas Rescher's book Paradoxes: Their Roots, Range, and Resolution, published by Open Court in 2001. In my opinion, Rescher is the most underrated living American philosopher, though he's certainly not gone without substantial professional recognition.)
Another of my favorite bedside books this year was Between Heaven and Earth: A History of Chinese Writing, by Shi Bo (Shambala). I first became interested in this subject many years ago via Ezra Pound. Shi Bo's survey, originally published in France, is a slim paperback with wonderful calligraphy and clear exposition throughout. If this subject interests you too, you might want to pick up a copy of Henri Michaux's eccentric little book, Ideograms in China, published last year by New Directions in a translation by poet and novelist Gustaf Sobin, with an afterword by the Pound scholar Richard Sieburth. And to follow the thread in another direction, you might pick up Sieburth's Library of America edition, Pound: Poems and Translations, or his edition of The Pisan Cantos (New Directions), both published this fall. And if you wonder why you should give a fig for Ezra Pound in the first place, maybe you could try The Pound Era, by the great critic Hugh Kenner, who died this November; published in 1971, it remains as fresh and pertinent to our own moment as any critical work of the past half-century.
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