{"id":1774,"date":"2010-10-07T22:01:02","date_gmt":"2010-10-08T02:01:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=1774"},"modified":"2010-10-07T22:01:02","modified_gmt":"2010-10-08T02:01:02","slug":"escape-from-combray-by-rick-snyderugly-duckling-presse-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/escape-from-combray-by-rick-snyderugly-duckling-presse-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"Escape from Combray by Rick SnyderUgly Duckling Presse, 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"

I picked this book out from the “new books” shelf at the library based on its title (I do like Proust!) and its cover<\/a>, which is letterpress-printed and lovely, an old street map with great type. I flipped the book open and whatever poem I saw (I don’t remember which one it was) was good enough, or at least intriguing enough, for me to check it out.<\/p>\n

According to the publisher’s website<\/a>, “Escape from Combray<\/em> presents an intimate cycle of poems exploring the growing sense of urban ennui and dislocation affecting a generation of Americans. Snyder’s poems evokes a psychogeographic landscape where quotidian symbols of the working class juxtapose with the timeless profundity of Proust, Virgil, and Dante.” <\/p>\n

On first my first read-through of this collection (it’s just 75 pages, and easy enough to read on the train to work and the train home), it was the quotidian landscape of the poems I liked best, the convenience stores and sidewalks, Chicago weather, the sun in winter “setting fast\/as if it too were cold,” as Snyder puts it in “Decoy” (52). I like the poetic persona here: someone who stays up late reading Dante (in “The World Below”), who notices words and signs: signs for cold beer in Spanish and Polish, or a sign looking for temps “a las 4:30\/en la fucking manana<\/em>” (61), and who captures the image of an empty store at closing time (in “How Are You Doing”<\/a>) with the images of “a bin of flip-flops\/and Tasmanian Devil\/baseball caps,” “freshly-mopped floors\/and fluorescent lights” (16). <\/p>\n

But on a second reading, I liked the literariness, too, which comes with a certain amount of wryness and play: like when, in “Postpoem” (it might be an ominous sign for that to be the name of the first piece in a collection, but it works), Snyder talks about a “periphrasis so elaborate\/that even Virgil gets a little cross,\/though he won’t show it, or wear it” (9). <\/p>\n

One of my favorites, both times through, was “Erasmus,” which you can read here, on John Latta’s blog<\/a> (and while you’re there, read the letter immediately after it, plus the passage from Preserved Smith’s Erasmus<\/em> that follows it.<\/p>\n

Tangentially: do you look things up when you read (words, places, people)? I’m definitely a looker-upper, sometimes an over-looker-upper, in that I look things up that aren’t crucial to understanding a book\/chapter\/passage, and things that I won’t remember in a day or so: so you might argue that I might as well not have looked them up at all. But it brings me joy. Like when Rick Snyder, in a poem, mentions walking down Fullerton Ave. past “Lowell-Berteau Plating,” and I find out that there is a “Berteau-Lowell Plating” and find it on Google Maps and look at its sign in street view<\/a> and look at pictures of a few blocks of Fullerton Ave. while I’m at it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I picked this book out from the “new books” shelf at the library based on its title (I do like Proust!) and its cover, which is letterpress-printed and lovely, an old street map with great type. I flipped the book open and whatever poem I saw (I don’t remember which one it was) was good […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1774\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}