One of my favorite line breaks in poetry:
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
You had was years ago.
There's so much promise in that kiss, and it is so brilliant subverted. I find myself whispering it to myself sometimes, and I won't even know why. I guess it's the beat of it; it sticks to your brain like a melody: The last good kiss you had was years ago. There are a few snippets of poetry like that for me*, but not many.
The line is from Richard Hugo, and it gave the title to the crime novelist James Crumley's best novel, The Last Good Kiss. It's an ambitious and deliciously violent novel, and it was the book that made me love detective fiction when my boss at Booklist, Bill Ott, passed it along to me. The Last Good Kiss is famous for its first line, widely agreed to be the best first line in the history of mystery novels, and maybe any novel:
"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."
Crumley died last week at 68. He was a hell of a good writer--that sentence just cracks the surface of his achievements--and he'll be missed.
* An incomplete list of other lines that I find myself whispering sometimes, and I am probably misquoting these b/c I'm doing it from memory and when you repeat lines over and over you sort of end up making them yours:
Eliot's "The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune / of a broken violin on an August afternoon."
Katrina Vandenberg's "Keep me at my desk / Until this work is done."
Whitman's "And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves."
Dickinson's "I see thee better in the dark / I do not need a light."
Hughes' "Good morning daddy / ain't ya heard / the boogie woogie rumble / of a dream deferred?"
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/ By the false azure in the windowpane
ReplyDeletemy all time favorite
I'm partial to Plath's "Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I'm through" and Edna St. Vincent Millay's "First Fig": "My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-- / It gives a lovely light!"
ReplyDeletethat's funny, i read this post just as i was twittering about having a poem 'stuck in my head'
ReplyDeletein this case, it's the first nine lines of francis thompson's 'hound of heaven'
i fled him down the nights and down the days/
i fled him down the arches of the years/
i fled him down the labarynthine ways/
of my own mind, and in a mist of tears/
...
Another good opening line from a book is from Coetzee's "Disgrace":
ReplyDelete"For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well."
"For I am bound with fleshly bands,
ReplyDeleteJoy, beauty, lie beyond my scope;
I strain my heart, I stretch my hands,
And catch at hope. "
I am certain that Willy is mourning the creator of his namesake and hope that he is barking through the pain alright.
i like this:
ReplyDelete"rise, from where you are seated, smoking, at a wooden desk.
there has been a terrible dream in the apartment above, and then tenant is pacing."
but. i have no idea who wrote it, and my memory has probably altered it in the past ten years.
One of the quotes from book that really sticks with me is from Looking for Alaska its
ReplyDelete"Oh God no. I've maybe read a third of 'em. But I'm going to read all of them. I call it my Life's Library. Every summer since I was little, I've gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read."
I cant always remember it perfectly, but the brilliance of it is so awesome. The way Alaska has her life library, ant the role the library plays in the book.
What a lovely post
ReplyDeleteThe freeway turned you back in on yourself
ReplyDeleteand you found nothing, not even a good false name.
--Richard Hugo
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
--Wallace Stevens
Let the smells of mint go heady and defenseless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we'd failed them by our disregard.
--Seamus Heaney
"Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs - / Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."
ReplyDelete-Gerard Manley Hopkins
And all the rest of that poem is brilliant as well. I mean, "shining from shook foil"? I'll never get over its loveliness.
Hey, if you love Richard Hugo, then when you're in Seattle (if you have time, which I guess you won't), you should check out the Richard Hugo House (or check them out online at www.hugohouse.org). It's a fantastic thing in the world, just a little house full of resources for readers and writers of all stripes.
Can't wait to see you at the downtown Seattle library on 10/28!
Lot of writer death going around lately... anyone else notice? It's a shame...
ReplyDeleteI always have liked the lines from Emily Dickenson's poem "My Letter to the World" where she says:
"This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me."
It's a little cliche, and I know that... but it's just so frackin sad, it makes me cry because I KNOW how she feels about just wanting someone to care enough about your existence and just to care enough about YOU...
Lovely post, by the way.
What is it with all these really good author's dying?
ReplyDeletemy recent favorite is gregory galloway's "as simple as snow" first line:
ReplyDeleteanna cayne had moved here in august, just before our sophomore year in high school, but by february she had, one by one, killed everyone in town."
haunting as the rest of the book.
all time favorite, a story that could be true by william stafford
ReplyDeleteThey miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
"Who are you really, wanderer?"--
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
"Maybe I'm a king."
Someone already quoted one of my faves--Wallace Stevens.
ReplyDeleteSo many quotes, so little time but here is one from a poem called "The Bride" by Christine Garren since linebreaks is the thought :)
And the animal pastured for years, lowered its spine / into the grass and died.
And since I keep a quote notebook (yes nerdfighters!)
You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
-John Green in Looking for Alaska
:)
Amy Bloom, from Away:
ReplyDeleteIt is always like this;
the best parties are made by people in trouble.
We live and we love the world and we kid ourselves that the world loves us back.
Daylight takes us;
it peels us like fruit.
Great blog, thanks for the awesome tangent to my morning. And nerd quote journals -w00t!
I grow old... I grow old...
ReplyDeleteI shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
-T.S. Eliot
(from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which I could read again and again)
Hi! Excited to find this blog! Loved reading this entry and all the comments.
ReplyDeleteOn my list:
"And I haven't met you yet."
- from a poem by Robyn Schiff
"Yo fui el arquitecto de mi propio destino."
- poem we learned in Spanish class, by Amado Nervo
"There are a thousand, thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient."
- Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Have fun in the twin cities, it's where I'm from.
Hughes is my all time favorite poet- I love that line as well.
ReplyDelete"Dream deferred"- it's a great phrase, isn't it?
Thank you for this.
ReplyDeleteOne of my favorite writing exercises is to open a book of poetry to a random page, pick a line, and run with it. My favorite for this is Lisel Mueller. Every line of her poetry has an infinite number of stories to tell.
This post is brilliant...I was going to refrain from commenting based on how I'd probably say something stupid, but who really cares anyway? This is one of my favorites:
ReplyDelete"I sit in one of the dives/On Fifty-second Street/Uncertain and afraid/As all the hopes expire/ Of a low dishonest decade"
-W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939"