Richard Brautigan

I'm not a poetry person. I used to be, when I was in high school, but even then I was only reading the poets that every teenage girl swoons over; e.e. cummings, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton. There are poets that I like, but in general I am not going to sit down with a book of poetry. I don't enjoy things that have to be read several times in order to be understood, unless they're going to make me feel really sad or really happy. I like poets that evoke maximum emotion in minimum words, like Charles Bukowski. Easy to read, funny, makes me depressed. Check, check, and check! But what if you want a version of Charles Bukowski that doesn't, like, make you feel terrible to be a woman? Enter Richard Brautigan.

Richard Brautigan manages to describe things in ways that don't make any sense at all, yet they make perfect sense. It's the same way I feel about a really good pulled pork sandwich; I wouldn't be able to tell you why it tastes so great, it just does. Richard Brautigan's poems make me see things from different angles, and they make me sadder than just about anything. Here's one of my favorites:

"Boo, Forever"
Spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a
top,
I'm haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
you.

Probably my favorite website in all of the internet is The Brautigan Bibliography and Archive. Don't visit it unless you have an afternoon, or an evening, or a few days to kill. You can read his poetry there, as well as read about his life.
Here's one of his most famous poems:

"Love Poem"
It's so nice
to wake up in the morning
all alone
and not have to tell somebody
you love them
when you don't love them
any more.

Not that all of them are so sad. Some of his poems are funny, maybe even cute, without any hint of sadness:

"December 30"
At 1:30 in the morning a fart
smells like a marriage between
an avocado and a fish head.

I have to get out of bed
to write this down without
my glasses on.

You can search by poem title and also by collection title in the archive. It's such a great resource and I'm so happy it exists. You can also, if you're curious, read about Richard Brautigan's life and death, but be warned that it is confusing and tragic, and not in the fun way. If you're near a good library or in the mood to buy some books, I'd recommend his poetry collections. For me, his novels have been a little difficult to get through, but maybe they'll be exactly what you're looking for! Several summers ago on my lunch break from my shitty summer job I was reading Trout Fishing in America, which features a scene where two characters have sex in a pool of stagnant river water and a dead fish floats by. Now I can't eat chicken salad anymore without thinking of that scene. SO be warned, I guess. Regardless of what I just said, please check out Richard Brautigan's poetry and that wonderful, wonderful website. Whenever I visit it, I think, "So THIS is what the internet was made for!"

Books of My Youth: Grandma & Grandpa's Basement Edition

When I was a kid, my grandma's basement housed a lot of things; canned fruits and vegetables, way-too-realistic-looking toy guns from when my uncles were children, a persistent mildew smell. But what I was most interested in, of course, were the books! A shelf in the corner held a relatively small but reliably strange collection of damp books, many of which I read on the long afternoons Alex and I spent there during the summer. I know it's such a cliche to reminisce about the laziness of your youthful summers, but man, it just seemed like we had endless amounts of time then. I could just pick up a book I'd never heard of and knew nothing about and not think about all the other millions of things I should be doing with my time. Okay, to be honest that kind of sounds like my life now. But it was just different somehow. When I think of summers spent at my grandparents', I think of Little Alex running around wearing an army helmet, stray cats that we terrorized (we were just trying to love them!), and rooting through those books in the basement.
Memorable books include a cautionary but still pretty tame story about teen pregnancy that I really wish I could remember the title of; a copy of 1984 that included a picture of George Orwell with a mustache added by one of my aunts or uncles; a young-girl-friendship book called The Secret Language; and this gem, which I just remembered today for no reason at all:

Tomas and his sister didn't have parents or something, and they were trying to avoid being found out by children's services or the welfare agency. It was all very Boxcar Children, but with a Puerto-Rican twist. That cover's been lodged in my brain ever since I first saw it. I wish book covers still had this delightful hand-drawn look. I would say that I want to save this book for my future children, but honestly, it's probably been overtaken by the mildew at this point.