Last week I misquoted W. H. Auden in this space. I could confirm the correct quote for you if only I could find my Collected edition of Auden’s poems. That book, for some reason, has fled the shelf. God knows where. I don’t like to confirm quotes by someone like Auden by searching the Internet. People like me misquote him.
Much as I try to keep a handle on the books around here, I’ve never been all that good at it. They come in and I pile them where I can. And, as a jurist for a big old national book award now for the last four or five years, I must tell you that the books are really piling up. Not just the poetry. Lots of novels and skittery little collections of short stories. Mostly though it’s the obscene gobs of nonfiction. Today I wondered: Should I read the new JFK biography or the new one on Derek Jeter? It’s relentless.
It used to be I would pile the books, as I say, wherever I could find space in the studio. I’d just stack them on the little electric radiators (we have no heat up here!). I’d tip them gently onto the little electric white box fans. Then there are the chairs I try to reserve for visitors. But there are no places for them to sit now. Nor is there a place on the back of those chairs even to hang my jacket — the slender ledges of the chairs are balancing a couple dozen of the books too. When they’re not tipping over onto the floor.
Then there are the migratory books — not that I ever move them! — that skip from one table to another, from the floor to the windowsill, and a whole rotating group of books, mostly literary journals, that I have used to prop up my desk because the legs broke years ago from the weight of too many books. What used to be slender pegs in the fashion of a splendid work desk are now the real estate of fat, once-read quarterlies.
I resist lending books to people, which I’m sure is going to get me into trouble with St. Peter when the time comes. “Don’t want your first born to live?” I’ll ask and then, ugh, hand it over if they persist. My resistance is futile in the end, I’m afraid. I haven’t seen my copy of Charles Wright’s Other Side of the River in a decade. Believe me, I miss it. I can’t remember which poem the part “Goodbye, Miss Sweeney, goodbye. I’m starting to think about the psycho-transference of all things” comes from, or where the lines break. I hope I’ve quoted it correctly. Anyone?
Help is on the way however. I’ve been fortunate to have several wonderful volunteer librarians come by and help me out over the last year or so even as they look at me with a good amount of pity. They try to hide it, but I can see.
I won’t sell the books to the local big house bookseller here — I just might need that memoir by Joan Collins or Cheryl Strayed for something…like a quote. So we have determined to create a lending library in the best spirit for the hundreds and hundreds of writers who come around to the Attic Institute where I work. No surprise, every few weeks the good librarians come, hat in hand, asking for funding for another couple bookshelves. The books continue to pile up.
When I first got into this reviewifying, columnifying, criticifying business, I was delighted to get new books this way. The little padded envelopes with the whole of western civilization shoved in! Now the UPS guy doesn’t even ask me for my signature. Though I do know him well enough to ask about his newborn little girl. His fourth. And his father is cancer free finally. That sister of his, well, she’s a piece of work.
The scads of poetry books pile up naturally. I haven’t counted how many there are just for the publishing year 2013 alone. Because I’m supposed to be evaluating every single one of them with the heart and spirit of Solomon deciding the fate of the baby, I’ve been reading more poetry than one really should and still have faith in the art. Some of the books are quite fine. Others, just fine. That covers it.
I have several editions of poet X’s newest book. Plus an edition of the advance reading copy that I spilled coffee all over the day it arrived. I expect all the various copies of that book will find their appointed place on the shelf or, for now, on the floor, like a family of clones. I often think that I should give at least one of them to an aspiring poet. But I don’t want that young poet to think I’m recommending it! Better play it safe and keep them all.
Meantime, there’s the judgifying I have to do.
Judging a book for the competition’s sake is honorable in its fashion. Anytime you can give a poet a leg up in the public space of literary fashion and notoriety is decent work. Such as it is. Some of the books are written by poets who are enormously gifted. But it’s the moderately gifted ones that give me the most hope about the future of the imagination. Kurt Vonnegut says, “a moderately gifted person would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago.” And they keep writing new books of poetry. God love them.
But now, Vonnegut says, modern communications put the moderately gifted writer “into daily competition with nothing but the world’s champions.” Modern communications and national book awards, that is.
That’s not ideal, is it? Writing a poem is challenging enough. In poetry is the preservation of the world.
Now, in spite of boarding a flight today for New York to jurify these new books of poetry over the next few days, and in spite of the long lists and the short lists, and the final lists, and the best of lists, and the winners circles, you know, to all of you out there writing poems and books of poems, I say to you, keep it up, will you? Just. Write. The. Poems.
I won’t be doing anything bad with your books. But I am going to let them pile up around me with all the life they have to offer.
