I like Bluets a lot. The book is a collection of lyrical essays that I think could also be called prose poems, but they are a range of things: inquiry into other color works, mundane observations, about blue things, peppered with sex memories. Blue is about blue, the color, and the various emotional states we associate it with, but it is also about grief, the loss of a relationship, an analogical way of expressing that obsession and that amputated passion.



As a meditation about blue, she also so

I like Bluets a lot. The book is a collection of lyrical essays that I think could also be called prose poems, but they are a range of things: inquiry into other color works, mundane observations, about blue things, peppered with sex memories. Blue is about blue, the color, and the various emotional states we associate it with, but it is also about grief, the loss of a relationship, an analogical way of expressing that obsession and that amputated passion.



As a meditation about blue, she also somehow draws on (she says) “principal correspondents” (who might be friends she has written to?), and her reading of “principal suppliers,” (the philosopher Wittgenstein and the poet Goethe), music, movies, nature.



In other words, let’s think about blue instead of who left. Fill up that loss with blue. But that’s too simple, because, yes, blue has supplanted the lover, but is really the same thing. There’s a bunch of sometimes graphic sex in this experimental break-up piece to break up the philosophy, just in case you begin to think she is getting too much into aesthetic theory. The body and its loss of connection with another body (okay, the lust for the person who left) is never far from this collection of meditations, just to wake you up and remind you that for Nelson, sex and blue may just be the same thing, in some poetic/lyrical sense.



Experimental form. Lyrical essays.



Things I like that she mentions: Warhol’s Blue movie. Joni Mitchell’s Blue.



William Gass’s On Being Blue. (this one is central)



Joseph Cornell, Leonard Cohen.



It’s in some ways like Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red!



Some excerpts:



For blue has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise any wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither toward justice nor away from it. It is pharmakon. It radiates.





Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. “We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it,” wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don't want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any “blueness.” Above all, I want to stop missing you.



For to wish to forget how much you loved someone--and then, to actually forget--can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of all things.” This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).



I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.



Sitting in my office before teaching a class on prosody, trying not to think about you, about my having lost you. But how can it be? How can it be? Was I too blue for you. Was I too blue. I look down at my lecture notes: Heartbreak is a spondee. Then I lay my head down on the desk and start to weep. --Why doesn't this help?



So, I sometimes liked it, I loved it, I was sometimes bored by it’s scholarly feel at times, I was sometimes fascinated by all the facts about blue, I was moved by it, and I want to write Greenets right now. Sometimes I think that can be the best thing about a book, that it makes you want to write, and read more, and do your own set of inquiries and passionate meditations.

