Discoveries

Divagations

Stephane Mallarme, translated from the French by Barbara Johnson

Harvard University/Belknap Press: 312 pp., $29.95

SOMETIMES I worry that we no longer let our minds truly wander. The mind runs out a little way and then scampers back to the same old ruts. Stephane Mallarme, poet and critic, often called the father of French Symbolism, made a living off his wandering mind. This 1897 collection of his musings on culture, theater, poetry, literature, solitude, you name it, makes almost no pretense at cohesion. “This is a book just the way I don’t like them,” he wrote in the preface, “scattered and with no architecture.” Most of the pieces are journalism, astonishing in these days of terse reporting and dwindling space. A reader would be more likely to savor Mallarme in a cafe, late into the morning, than, say, online.

The collection includes portraits of Rimbaud, Verlaine, Tennyson, Wagner, Morisot, Manet and Whistler and meditations on the differences among music, verse, painting and dance. Mallarme often talks directly to his reader: “Come here, close the old German almanac you are reading with such attention ... and, lying on the antique carpet, my head resting on your charitable knees ... I’ll talk to you for hours.” He’s fascinated by ideas; he worries that the next generation doesn’t struggle enough with them. He notes the “public’s disinclination to read” and the unwillingness of journalists to experiment with new forms. His love of writing is contagious, the whole enterprise gleeful and subversive; these essays are sprinkled with phrases like “suffering trees” and “the irony of winter.” Each book, he writes, is “a tiny tomb for the soul.”

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Night Life

Laurie Anderson

Edition 7L: 96 pp., $35

SPEAKING of wandering minds, Laurie Anderson, artist at large in the fields of music, film, performance, writing, photography and sculpture, decided to draw her vivid dreams using a computer tablet on her bedside table. The results, some in color, some in black and white, come with brief explanations:

“I’ve been served penguin in a restaurant somewhere in Brighton. Everything is chalky white. I’m not sure what to do. The penguin is damp and limp. Possibly breathing. Maybe dead.”

Or my favorite, a scratchy drawing of a green, wide-eyed gnome (“Taking my mind for a walk”). She noticed a figure observing the action in many of the dreams: It was herself.

In her theory of dreams, the “set of neurons that sends information to the brain about the location of the head and body” opens “two new channels -- audio and visual,” which send “random fake information ... about the size, shape and orientation of your head and body. We then spend much of the night trying to process this imaginary data.” Anderson has always been a pioneer; it’s fun to watch her wander the dream fields after 30 years of raw creativity.

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Voices From Leimert Park

A Poetry Anthology

Edited by Shonda Buchanan

Tsehai: 202 pp., $19.95 paper

LEIMERT PARK at 43rd Place and Crenshaw is a focus for poets, artists and activists -- mostly, but not exclusively, African American -- who began gathering around Fifth Street Dick’s and the World Stage Performance Gallery, home of the Anansi Writers Workshop, in the early 1990s. The work of 49 poets is collected here -- better-known writers such as Wanda Coleman and Jervy Tervalon as well as spanking new writers like Debra A. Varnado, whose poem “An L.A. Rhythm” is one of my favorites: “In real time, Broadway to Fifth, / Transfer, two down, one to go, / Food 4 Less, Hope then Spring.”

Like this poem, many give a real sense of landscape, of taking something back, of owning a city. “this land is ours,” writes Ariel Robello. “here manifest destiny dare not brand its legend / arrows pointing toward an imagined west / a muted south, a lonely east, a frozen north / all trains are caught still / no freeways flap close enough to wake us....”