Make Yourself Happy

by Eleni Sikelianos

Praise for Eleni Library Journal Best Books 2013: Poetry Electric as a lightning storm, wild as a first-growth forest, protean as fantasy's shape-shifters—that's Sikelianos's poetry, a real pleasure to read."— Library Journal Using text and images, moving spikily across the page and across ideas in ever-expanding loops, Make Yourself Happy is devoted to one of the oldest and most important human how to live. Humanity, happiness, and the survival of the biosphere spin each section forward, species are wiped out, yet the poem endures. You walk into the sunlight
to make yourself happy.
This is the poem that will tell you
how to live.

Genres: Poetry

168 pages, Paperback

Published February 7, 2017

About the author

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Loving Detail of the Living and the Dead, as well as a hybrid memoir, The Book of Jon. Sikelianos directs the creative writing program at the University of Denver.

Reviews

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like this anthology of poetry would have worked better as two separate books. It's already divided into two sections: the title portion and "How to Assemble the Animal Globe" which focuses less on emotions and more on animal extinctions.

That being said, I much preferred the first part. I needed a book that delves into the inner workings of the human brain. How do we muddle through our lives when happiness proves elusive. Through her poetry, Eleni Sikelianos suggests paying attention to the small things. The unnoticeable happiness rd that can suffuse our ordinary lives.

It is a concept I can get behind.

The second part, though interesting in format and informative in concept (I know a lot more about extinct animals than I did before reading), it's really quite a downer. Here's 55 pages of poems dedicated to now-dead species and an interactive map detailing where they lived (before humans most likely killed them off).

Not to be self-centered but it's kinda the opposite of making me happy.

I bought this book because Sikelianos spoke at the bookstore when I was there a few weeks ago. Her reading inspired me to purchase this book.

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Reality’s really / dirty,” writes Eleni Sikelianos in Make Yourself Happy, a collection of poems exploring the so-called real in all its dirt-dusted, mud-splattered “glory,” poems in conversation with William Carlos Williams, Aristotle, Cecil Taylor, Csikszentmihalyi, the Dalai Lama, Flaubert, Aeschylus, Pliny, Bernadette Mayer, Jacques Roubaud, John James Audubon, Robert Smithson, and Sappho, especially Sappho, poems digging into the earth, an earth threatened by the ongoing catastrophe that is humanity, in continent-hopping poems elegizing many extinct animals, poems that indict the animal largely if not wholly responsible for the extinctions, the animal’s at best dubious and likely doomed pursuit of happiness.

[isra · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.50 💫

[Jeff Carpenter · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's scattered notions of great import, and sparks of brilliance... the experiment of a master who didn't hit the target with this one. I often take a look at it, and always find a beautiful passage.

[V · Rating 5 out of 5]

The ways the poems in this collection change form and color and tone and texture across pages seem to mirror the tidal changes of evolution over millennia, a fitting way to frame an extended elegy for recently extinct species. Framing humans as animals attempting to fulfill basic needs within our own devised habitats leads to naming lost species leads to the eventual breakdown of the biosphere. It would seem cruel that a book called Make Yourself Happy should make one so sad, but that's entirely the point.

[Terry Pitts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Make Yourself Happy consists of three long poem sequences, followed by two short stand-alone poems. “Make Yourself Happy” is comprised of 39 individual poems. Superficially, one might say that the sequence explores the many meanings of “happiness,” whether it’s eating croissants in Paris or simply being alive. But Sikelianos is after something far deeper and more complex than that. Slowly but surely, as this nearly 60-page poem sequence evolves, Sikelianos unravels the whole notion of happiness. Yes, there is a true, indomitable form of happiness that “baffles what’s trying to get in” to destroy it, but there are also false states of happiness that are driven by things as simple as the consumption of sugar-filled snacks or the indulgence in drugs like heroin. Heroin, violence, misery, and other decidedly unhappy themes are always lurking in these poems. In one poem, we see happiness used with decidedly Orwellian intent:

In the United Arab Emirates there is now a Ministry of Happiness
“You can be happy as long as you keep your mouth shut.

In a sly way, the title of this poem sequence is a reference to the pop culture and entertainment worlds that are dedicated to making us happy. (Remember songs like “Margaritaville” or “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”?) The poem sequence opens with a version of the photograph that is also seen on the book’s front cover. It’s an ethereal image by Sikelianos’ husband, writer Laird Hunt, that captures the blur of people dancing and snapping photographs at a rock concert (note the snare drum or tom that appears to be floating in the air). The other photograph that appears in this sequence is a nearly abstract video still of a blurry roller skate taken at a roller derby. These two almost delirious images made me want to get far from my desk and buy a ticket to something that had nothing to do with literature.

“How To Assemble the Animal Globe,” the second major sequence in the book, is a 58-page poem sequence structured geographically, continent by continent, eulogizing animals that have been forced into extinction. Sikelianos provides the pieces of an outline globe pattern for the reader to cut out and assemble, creating a globe of extinction, though I doubt many readers will want to deface the book to actually do this. In this “ghost dance of all the animals,” she reminds us through poems and images of what we are losing as we ruin our planet. The images of extinct animals include photographs, drawings, and prints.

The final sequence, “Oracle, or Utopia,” deals with Biosphere 2, a structure in Oracle, Arizona, just north of Tucson, which was designed to be a closed ecological system that would prepare humans for life on another planet. The original project ran into countless technical and human problems (not unlike our own current experiment on Earth) and lasted only two years.

[This is just part of the longer review that I posted on my blog: https://sebald.wordpress.com/2017/02/...].