At The Kenyon Review, Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky reflects on book-lovers who end relationships because their partner doesn’t share their taste in books:
What a relief finally to hear the truth spoken aloud! Ever since I was a little boy and saw the girl across the street reading One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, I’ve known that I couldn’t respect a woman with a taste for rhyme. As life went on, I learned that reading poetry in general was a sure sign of an underlying character flaw and a tendency never to pick up the check in expensive restaurants. Readers of epics, I have learned, expect heroics in bed, so no dark-eyed readers of blank verse for me! Plays imply a talkative streak which no man can abide. (Except Corneille. But let’s not quarrel, my love.) To readers of memoirs I say simply, “Get a life!” And on my therapist’s orders, I cannot have a biography in the house. (Performance anxiety. Inevitable death. You understand.)
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Apr 10th, 2008 at 1:29 am
Love,
Rhythm and rhyme are fine in books read in nooks
although poets are liars or so say philosophiars,
legends I find are tangents of times out of mind,
and dramatics have now become nowt but schematics,
or at least that’s how I remember the sturm und drang of my notes,
and then there’s that book about me that you were writing,
or was it me that was writing of you ?
But that of course was before you were so unexpectedly
called away and I left you in coitus interpretus penum.