Picked up an uncorrected proof of Maxine Hong Kingston’s “unconventional memoir” I Love A Broad Margin To My Life a couple of months ago. It’s really a big long poem (free verse maybe? not sure if there’s a difference?), and for me, personally, I felt like I was sloshing through flooded language. The words and pictures oozed underfoot, and I felt grounded in nothing. I rarely give up on books entirely — at the very least, I’ll read the first sentence of every paragraph — but I gave up on this a quarter of the way through. Just not my style.
(Admittedly, I am not fluent in the reading of poetry. This is possibly a stellar prose poem but I lack the literary sophistication to notice!)
Though, I learned the words ‘doubloon’ and ‘enow’, and I do like these bits:
Mother’s eyesight blurred; she saw trash as
flowers. “Oh. How very beautiful.”
She was lucky, seeing beauty, living
in beauty, whether or not it was there.
(p. 4)
Everywhere wander people who have not
the ability to handle this world.
(p. 14)
When I
complete this sentence, I shall begin
taking my sweet time to love the moment-
to-moment beauty of everything. Every one. Enow.
(p. 223; final line)
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