Staff Picks: Edward Mycue's Ten Favorite Books
 Each month, we ask one employee to tell us about their ten favorite books. This list is no holds barred -- any genre, any size -- whatever they really want to talk about. The only restriction is that the books still be in print so that we can help you find them if they sound good.This month's presenter is Tech Floor employee Edward Mycue. A published poet and mainstay of the San Francisco literary scene, Edward is always ready with a fascinating story about the writers he has known and whose work has made a difference in his life. This month he shared a few of these thoughts, reminiscences, and recommendations for Stacey's customers. |
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 Complete Poemsby Basil Bunting "His 'Briggflats' is the best 20th century long poem in English. Many of his poems about the Middle East (where he spent the middle part of his adult life) will appeal especially nowadays. He celebrates the North of England where he began and where he ended his days. |
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 The Horse's Mouthby Joyce Cary "Three books, each from a different view. Carey wrote two major trilogies. In both, the point of view of each third is a different character's observation. He started out as a painter. Later he was in Africa working in colonial government. One of his novels is Mr. Johnson. There have been films of that book and also of The Horse's Mouth, the latter with screenplay and starred-in by Alec Guinness." |
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 Selected Poemsby Robert Duncan "I met George Oppen in 1970 -- he was the grand old man of poets on the West Coast then, having received a Pulitzer after returning to the U.S. after exile and working in Mexico as a cabinet maker since the 50s -- and he said 'Robert Duncan is the last of the great Romantic poets, and 'We'll never see another after Robert. He's almost a throwback.' And this was about this great modern poet who there never was another like perhaps because he was so, not mainly learned, but deep and strange. Not really 'strange' strange, but esoteric, deep, almost charmed. And it's true -- he is so unique that he has no followers, can't be imitated, and can't be counterfeited." |
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 The Scarlet Letterby Nathaniel Hawthorne  "This guy could have written with his elbows. The critic Newton Arvin has written the best stuff about Hawthorne and Melville's friendship without the lurid implications that later books delighted in. Hawthorne's slim novels are icons of American literature. Along with Edgar Allen Poe, there is no other author so aware of what it means to be an American writer in the sea of the English language. When you add Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to them, you have a proud assemblage." |
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 Complete Poemsby D.H. Lawrence "Lawrence is best known for his novels, and they're fine in their ways, but kind of preachy. His poems, however, will last a person a whole lifetime and some."  "Lawrence, William Butler Yeats, and Robinson Jeffers are a great triad of strength for me. They were close in feeling and knew each other well." "F.A. Lea, professor of moral philosophy at the University of London and adopted son of John Middleton Murray, felt the weight of Lawrence's poems and rated them as nourishing of the human spirit -- the highest accolade Frank bestowed on poems (I said to him once 'Frank, you make poems sound like vitamins,' and he didn't deny it.)" |
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 Truth, War, and the Dream Gameby Lawrence Fixel "Of all my ten writers chosen here, Fixel alone is still alive, at the age of 83. Poet, storyteller, and philosopher, he writes of 'the warm intrigue of memory trailing daylight through splintered stones.' I recommend this book from 1992, which contains modern parables and their pals, the prosepoems. The length of each piece is usually a page or so, but what's there is choice--deep and distilled. Surely not for everybody at any period of your life, but it's likely there will come a day when the crystalline intensity of their luminous understanding or probing of life's commonplaces will flower in your brain (perhaps the way the art of blacksmithing is transformed into an ornamental gate of forged steel). World enough. George Oppen introduced him to me and through Fixel I met Josephine Miles and Raymond Carver. Lawrence Fixel has been at the center of committed intellectual life of writers and artists for 60 years in California. He was born in New York. At age 19, he was the youngest of the writers in the WPA Writers Project, where his older contemporaries included Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison." You can visit Lawrence Fixel on the web at www.glimmers.homestead.com |
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 Coming to Termsby Josephine Miles  "When I first met Josephine Miles, she was carried into the Fixels' living room by a student attendant. She was so small and wizened, with gnarled hands and a radiant smile. Then she spoke and I was changed. And then she read her poems and I was changed. And then she spoke of poetry and I was changed. This Milton scholar wrote simply, clearly, and with humor, anger, and compassion. What fine poems they are--glories of poetry of my time." "Josephine died in the late 80's. She had been in Yvor Winters' class along with Ann Stanford, but Josephine was thrown out." |
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 Poemsby George Oppen "I met George and Mary when I moved to San Francisco for good in 1970. His long poem 'Of Being Numerous' is austere, precise, haunting. It was called 'The Poem of New York' in a developing version which I recall from an earlier book, This In Which. Talking about  poetry that was bombastic and of explosive typography, he commented that it did not make it louder to print it bigger. Oppen's spare vision seems easy to pair with the British poet William Empson--both can be astringent and clear-eyed even while being lyrical.""Oppen is associated with a group called 'The Objectivists' that included Charles Reznikof, who wrote the two volumes of 'Testimony' and who wrote poems about real situations and real people, just as Oppen did. Another member of that group, which was fostered by Ezra Pound, is Carl Rakosi, a literary chum of Lawrence Fixel who was born in 1903 and still lives in San Francisco." |
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 Complete Poemsby John Keats "What a different poet he is. He died young. He's got sound and sense and light and dark. One of his longer poems is 'Hyperion,' which he worked on in different versions. Just open his poems anywhere. Shelly and Byron are different contemporaries, and his was also a time when Wordsworth and Coleridge held sway. Yet John Keats is a jewel poet." |
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 Complete Poemsby John Milton  "Milton's great and small poems are the glory of our language. It's the theology that smarts moderns like William Empson, who wrote Milton's God, excoriating this great poet.""Milton's sonnets, like 'On the Late Massacre In the Piedmontese' and 'On His Blindness,' are astounding and always ones to go back to." |
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