BLUETS - MAGGIE NELSON

More poetry. This was my “on the train on the way to work” book for the last week, as the Li Po was before that. I’m chewing up these shorter little numbers while I’m plowing through some much larger and more depressing non-fiction (review incoming, still got 200+ pages). This book was ideal for these reading conditions. It is the correct size and format for a book one reads in transit, i.e. it is softcover and small enough to fit in my back pocket. Likewise the format of the text is well suited to this approach. I guess one would call this a poem or prose poem with each “stanza” being as sort as a sentence or a long as a paragraph, perhaps a page long at most. The best have a gnomic quality such as “115. In which case seeking itself is a spiritual error.” Each of these “stanzas” are numbered and referred to as “propositions” in a manner that recalls Wittgenstein, who also wrote a book about color and who is referenced directly in the text several times. Nelson is also aware that Gass wrote a book about the color blue, which I read and reviewed about a month ago (this is the season of blue for me, apparently) and references it as well. There’s lots of Goethe, Joni Mitchell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the woman who wrote “The Pillow Book.” She makes reference to the fact that she toyed with several orders for the “propositions” before settling on the one she published in this book. I believe she’s called it a “nomadic mosaic” which feels correct. The book follows a few threads, there’s a story about a recently paraplegic friend who is adjusting to a new life, there’s reflections on a past lover, there’s Nelson’s lifelong affinity for the color blue and then more free-associative sections where she meditates on some of the connotations of blue (these are the most Gass-esque sections) such as it’s association with obscenity (blue movies, working blue) and it’s association with sorrow or depression. I find it interesting that both her and Gass would not touch the connection between blue and law enforcement, ex “the boys in blue.” I appreciate the directness of Nelson’s poetics, her language is much closer to the “creative nonfiction” end of the literature spectrum, she folds in interesting facts (did not know about Isabelle Eberhardt, look her up) and remains, mostly, straightforward and direct. She also has a poet’s bravery to really chase things and ideas out to the limits, past the “logical” which leads to some shinning insights and breakthroughs. On a quibbling level, she makes some statements about the Tuareg people of North Africa, famous, in part, for wearing lots of indigo, so much so it often dyes their skin, giving them a reputation as a “blue people,” that I don’t believe are true (and that 30 seconds of googling seemed to dispel). But I wasn’t reading this for the anthropology, and on the level of poetic excellence this delivered. Why is blue the color all these books are written about? Is there an equivalent book about green? I assume there must be a few about red (the most primary color, a conversation for another day) but I’ve never heard of them. Going to have to read more Nelson. 240 shades of blue.