Rachel Zucker’s been blogging over at Harriet for National Poetry Month, and two of her posts include several poets’ (including me!) answers to the following questions:
What are your non-poetry sources?
What kind of poetry do you write?
Find out what kind of poem I like to take to bed with me and what secret activity keeps me busy in the pantry.
I’m up at Black Lawrence Press with a new poem and talking about Saskatchewan and Jennifer Denrow.
I am not a working-class poet. I don’t really write much about working-class themes, and I grew up mostly lower-middle class. My parents were raised working-class. My mother was a refugee from Hungary, and my father was one of seven children of an Italian-American railroad worker and an Irish-American stay-at-home mom. Even my stepdad was raised working class – one of ten children who got hauled to school off their parents’ farm by a truant officer in the fall and spring. But all three of them labored and saved to ensure that their children would have an easier time of it. Don’t get me wrong – I worked my ass off in high school and through college, but I had a car at 16 and we lived in the suburbs, and I got a fancy scholarship to a mediocre college in Long Island. So while I’m committed to the study of working-class poetry and the role of the commons in poetry, I can’t claim to be representative.
I am, however, a poet of place. In an interview I did with Nathan Spicer for The Southeast Review a couple of years back, I said,
I believe that people consist partly of place—the places where they grew up, the places they left behind, the place they occupy at the moment. When a person relocates, even for a week, a day, an hour, she changes. It makes sense that environment will have an effect on the psyche, but I think a person also changes biologically. She breathes different air, eats different food, and her senses are processing different stimuli. So I try to recreate the influence of place in my poems; I try to capture the transformative nature of geography.
And I like to think about the influence of place on other other people’s poems, and how the politics of place plays a role in working-class identity and working-class poetry and working-class art. And tonight I’m thinking about Pittsburgh, home to some of my favorite poets who took up the working-class torch:
Jan Beatty, Jim Daniels, Terrance Hayes, Leslie Anne McIlroy
In an interview he gave six years ago to the Tribune Review, Hayes explains the poetry scene of Pittsburgh:
I can go and hear a homicide detective like Jimmy Cvetic (read poetry). I can hear anybody read poetry. And anybody is bound to be in the audience. I can live in this strange, blue-collar neighborhood and have even the people riding their bikes at midnight come up to me and say, ‘Yeah, you’re a poet.’ And I was nobody. I was just a grad student.
I know Jimmy Cvetic. He runs the poetry series at Hemingway’s Cafe. Just talking about him and Pittsburgh, I slip into a sort of vernacular. A neighborhood-speak that I remember not from my neighborhood, but from my family – my uncles who were firemen, who were raised working-class and who did the same things for their children that my parents did for me. Yeah, I know Jimmy Cvetic. He runs the poetry series down at Hemingway’s. I read for him in 2010. Nice guy. Can be gruff as hell but a nice guy. Don’t want to get on the wrong side of him. You know he runs that boxing gym down on Third Avenue. Did I ever tell you the story of…
What is it about Pittsburgh that allows its working-class history and contemporaneity to blend so seamlessly with its culture of poetry? The Pittsburgh City Paper and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette regularly publish poetry and reviews. I can’t think of any other city in which two local papers give print to poetry, where the publications of the commons are the go-to publications for high art.
What is it with Pittsburgh? Is it the juxtaposition of the (post)industrial landscape with the beautiful hills that spill into the rivers that cradle it? It it the city’s embrace of its blue-collar history that enables it to also embrace poetry without pretension or anxiety?
I don’t know. But Pittsburgh, you just keep doing what you’re doing, and I’ll come back soon. (Make sure Mark Dignam and Bear Cub are singing when I get there.)
To follow up my previous post, I wanted to highlight a few sites on the internet that curate collections of working-class poetry and/or discuss the poetics of working-class poetry. This list will be incomplete, so I invite you to join the conversation and give a shout out to other online journals, sites, and presses that focus on working-class poetry and poetics.
Blue Collar Review: A journal of progressive working-class literature from Partisan Press.
Center for Working-Class Studies: Working-Class Literature: A list of resources, critical essays, and writers.
Occupy Poetry: There are multiple Occupy Poetry sites, and they all align themselves with the ongoing Occupy movement:
OccuPoetry: Poets Supporting Economic Justice
Occupy Poetry: Poems for Love, Peace and Change
Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology
Pemmican Press: An online journal that publishes “political poems, feminist poems, working class poems, ecological poems, revolutionary poems, poems to piss off the police, poetry of imagery and imagination, prose poems, long poems, short poems, and poems that destabilize the assumptions of the general aesthetic.”
Struggle: A magazine of proletarian revolutionary literature.
Union Songs: A searchable database of union songs and poetry.
Workers Write! Literary Journal: Not technically an online journal, but you can purchase a PDF of the journal for $4.
Working Class Poems: An anthology originally created for an undergraduate English class at Lycoming College in Williamsport, PA.
I’m thrilled to announce that Karen Weyant, the author of Stealing Dust and Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt, will be our guest blogger for Sunday, April 21st. Karen also blogs at The Scrapper Poet. When I started exploring working-class poetry and poetics, Karen was the first poet and scholar to reach out to me.
This is not a post about E-Literature or digital poetry. It’s about digital access to print poetry and poetry published for the first time online. I’m going to write about digi poetry later in the month, but right now I want to address the question about the vast availability of poetry on the internet, which I believe is a question of curation.
First, I don’t believe that curation and the commons are antithetical. Curation isn’t an exclusionary act, though some may suggest that it is. It is a process of deciding, a process of an individual or a group of individuals enacting their poetics. In that process, editors choose the poems that best represent their poetics, and they reject the ones that don’t. This becomes problematic when some massive anthologies make claims to a larger accumulation of poetics – something like Contemporary American Poetry edited by A. Poulin Jr. and Michael Waters, which I think is a great anthology. I have both the third and eighth editions on my bookshelf. But for any curated collection to claim that it represents all of – or even the best of – something as vast as the poetry produced in contemporary American – is to invite failure. You can’t do it. Best to admit to bias. Best to admit to incompleteness and the necessity to have multiple anthologies of contemporary American poetry. Best to say straight off that none can be definitive. We run into trouble when one anthology, for some reason or another, becomes the g0-to, the default, the trusted. Like the Norton. It gets taught over and over again and so the poets it includes become canonized while those who it excludes fall into obscurity. Which is why we are seeing so much recovery work now – not just of working-class poets but of other poets from disenfranchised communities.*
For that reason, I believe that the digital proliferation of literary journals and anthologies and websites are a positive development in the evolution of poetry. While many bemoan the concept that that internet enables any and every incompetent poetaster to litter the bi-waves with dross – is this really a problem? For those of us who go to the internet to read contemporary poetry, are we being assaulted by love poems written by 12 year olds? Are the margins of our google search page crowded with doggerel? Do we have to wrangle with pop-up windows that spew poor Seuss impersonators? No. It’s not a problem.
Well, it’s a tiny problem when you are searching for a poem or a collection on the web and you’ve forgotten the title and you’ve forgotten the author (and this happens to me all the time), so you type in some key phrases and maybe you have to wade through a bit of this and that before you are able to find what you are looking for, but have we turned in to such research sissies that we can possible complain about this process. Go thumb through a card catalog.**
The digital landscape serves as a commons in which everyone is empowered to curate their own collections based on their own poetics and interests. And while I won’t deny that there are some remnants of the digital divide still keeping people from fully utilizing the internet, the financial liberation of online publishing more than balances that out. You no longer need a printing or mailing budget to publish a journal. You don’t need to buy the paper or manage other distribution costs. You can spend a little time learning wordpress or blogspot and you can curate. And depending on people’s interests, they will read. Or they won’t. Because the commons promises everyone a space to create/curate/contribute and a space to exhibit their creations/collections/contributions and the ability to access everyone else’s creations/collections/contributions. The commons doesn’t promise equal attention or any attention at all. That’s not what the commons is for.
*To tell the truth, I don’t get so very worked up about the major player anthologies. I believe that anyone who is really interested in poetry will move quickly beyond them, will explore and discover the journals and poets which resonate with their interests. The big anthologies serve often, I think, as a bridge. Something that can carry a reader to the world of poetry.
**I MISS card catalogs!
This is the beautiful thing about the commons. We take what we need from where we need it. We give back what we can. Tonight I went to see Pina at the Dairy Center for the Arts. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in poetry, I forget what others are growing in their gardens.
I’ve been trying for fifteen minutes to articulate what I want to say about the arts, how they nourish each other. Just watch this clip, mostly from Vollmond. Then go write something. You’ll know.
To say I came of age as a poet on the streets of Albany, NY in the late 90s sounds silly, but it’s true. I wrote poetry in college, but I also became president of a sorority (which is the most ridiculous incongruity of my entire life and something I rarely talk about). I was the only poet I knew. I didn’t go to readings, and the only poets I read were Lyn Lifshin and Langston Hughes and the Beats. I was way too young for graduate school and floundered there. I managed to get my degree but wasn’t able to make close friends, and the other poets in the program intimidated me. I stopped writing poems. They were pretty horrid, anyway. I was writing in a vacuum and seldom progressed beyond dryads and cats and dive bars and Spanish mantillas or something like that. Something lacy. I was twenty three. It was 1995.
It blows my mind sometimes to think about twenty three year old MFA students or slam poets today, the ones who have been writing and reading and studying and honing their art seriously and with careerist ambition for seven or eight years. Maybe those young poets were around in the late 90s, too — the ones who had already amassed a significant number of rejections from literary magazines and a few acceptances, who were working, seriously, on their first collections — but they would have been aliens to me. I didn’t know there was a path, and if I had known, I wouldn’t have know how to follow it or why. I wrote poems. Then I stopped. It seemed inconsequential to everyone I knew.
In 1997, I went to my first open mic poetry reading at the amazing but long since gone punk bar The QE2. I don’t know what brought me. I had started writing again in a way a child might. I like the sounds of the words and the rhythms of the language. I wanted to write in the same rhythms that my body moved in. I wanted the rhythms to match up. I wanted the words and my body to say the same thing. I had returned to dance which may have influenced my return to writing. Both struggled to be mediocre.
But the QE2! It was freezing. I had a drink. There was some strange long-haired gray beard up on stage talking about God knows what but he was passionate. It was Tom Nattell. And one by one, the people scattered about the room took the stage and read a poem or two. Some were god-awful. Some were amazing. I read a poem about stalking. Or maybe it was about witches. I’m not certain, but I’m sure it was of the god-awful caliber.
(Photo by Dan Wilcox, QE2, 1997, my first open mic)
Nevertheless, R.M. Englehardt (who read a poem on the back of a book of matches) came up to me and spoke to me about my work, and about the work of others, and about Tom Nattell who ran the series, and about the other series in town. And it hit me like a glorious revelation – all of these poets knew each other. They drank together. They talked with each other. They were friends. And I thought to myself, I want this. I want to be among this. I want to burrow into this. I want this on all sides of me, and on top of me and underneath me. I wanted the community.
But I wanted something else, too. I wanted to merit community. I wanted to be able to contribute to this group of amazing and dedicated poets: R.M. whose gothic sensibilities had a modern edge; Mary Panza who was so purely hard core (you did not fuck with Mary Panza) and whose poems emanated fierceness; Don Levy who taught me how both humor and pop culture can both mock and strengthen a poem; Dan Wilcox whose poetry worked as hard as he did to progress his commitment to social activism; Annine Everson who over and over again broke her art; Terry Provost who wrote poems based on the philosophies of Noam Chomsky and history and who left me stuttering in the face of his brilliance; Alan Catlin whom I first read when I was 12; Joe Krausman who taught me how to appreciate gesture; Debra Bump who understood the intersection between punk and poetry; and Tom Nattell who loved poetry and the land equally, and who is now a part of both. There are many others who are part of the community, who came after I left and who carry the flame, but these were the ones who were there in 1997 when I came of age.
And I wanted to merit their friendship, and I wanted, when I took the stage, to give them something, not just to suck up their energy and encouragement. So I started reading poetry collections in earnest so I had something to say. And I started writing with an eye on what my poetry could achieve, not on what it was achieving. And I went to these glorious poetry readings at Cafe Web and QE2 and the Fuze Box and Valentines and Lark Tavern and Mother Earth’s and Changing Spaces Gallery where we drank and read and talked about poetry and argued (sometimes) and kissed (occasionally) and danced and celebrated and once someone got naked. And I realized that poetry can’t exist in a vacuum. It can’t exist in isolation. I mean, it can. But it won’t thrive. It won’t evolve. It will give nothing and take nothing. And its bones will wither and its muscles will atrophy and it will turn sour and smell like mold and snarl at everyone who comes close.
(Photo by Dan Wilcox, Fuze Box, March 28, 1999)
I am a poet because I come from a community of poets. They are my tribe, my home, my roots. They are there, in my relationship to every poem I read, to every poem I write, like a bridge of ghosts.
To preface tomorrow’s blog post, which will be about my coming of age in the poetry community of Albany, NY, I wanted to link to Dan Wilcox’s Blog, which documents in text and photos the shared experiences of poets living in Albany, Schenectady and Troy. Dan, along with the late Tom Nattell and other denizens of the Albany poetry scene, taught me what poetry can achieve when shared and lived instead of served under glass.
Thinking about Bill Knott’s comments regarding my list of working-class poets, I’ve been considering the idea of underground poets and outlaw poets and other poets who don’t identify (or who aren’t identified) as mainstream. I’ve been wondering, mainly, if the boundary between underground/outlaw and mainstream is impermeable. I don’t think it is. Sometimes I think the boundary is temporal. Ovid, for example, was considered an outlaw poet not just in his own time but in the 16th and 17th centuries, as well. He was, at times, considered too immoral or too irreverent. His love poems were publicly burned in London in 1599. But during the Renaissance he was wildly popular and now he’s, well, canonical.
What changed? The poetry didn’t (though the translations evolved). Cultural expectations of what poetry should do and the collective mores of society did. If Ovid was alive during the 1500s, he’d be so bummed that Virgil was getting all the attention, though (in my opinion) Virgil isn’t half the poet that Ovid is (go ahead, Robert Graves, let me have it). But today he’s on everybody’s list of great Latin poets.
In 2000 I bought the anthology The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry edited by Alan Kaufman and published by Thunder’s Mouth Press (since bought by Perseus Books) in 1999.
In the introduction (I love this introduction), Kaufman writes, “Here are the inventors of the Beat generation and the heroes of today’s Spoken Word movement, poets who don’t get taught in American poetry 101, yet hold the literary future in their tattooed hands.” He issues this challenge, “The Academy had best make room for these descendents of Whitman’s ‘Roughs’ and Emerson’s ‘Berserkers’: Our poets can whip your poets’ asses.”
Hallelujah! Whenever someone calls for a poetry smackdown, I’m all in. Not for the aggressive confrontation, but for the exploration of the poetics that would deem one poem better than the other. And you know those poetics will evolve and change. In the year 1347, we may see Virgil back on top again.
And to be honest, revisiting the table of contents, I found many poets whose work is no stranger to the university classroom: Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, Sapphire, Allen Ginsberg, Joy Harjo, William Carlos Williams, Rudolfo Anaya, Patricia Smith, William Burroughs. I found many poets who teach in university classrooms: Jeffrey McDaniel (Sarah Lawrence), D.R. Wagner (U.C. Davis), Sonia Sanchez (Temple), Ai (Oklahoma State), Gary Snyder (U.C. Davis).
I point this out not to show that Kaufman is blurring the lines between outlaw and academic, but that the lines between outlaw and academic will always be blurry. Some of that blurriness is temporal. The Beats were outlaws, but we study them in college classrooms as legitimate shapers of the American poetry landscape. But another component of the blur is permeability. Poetry can co-exist on the street and in the classroom. I have seen Regie Cabico perform his anthologized “Check One” in lecture hall filled with captivated Syracuse University students. Anne Waldman’s poetics helped to found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.
And it’s bullshit to argue that academia is co-opting street poetry. This isn’t true. Street poetry, underground poetry, outlaw poetry is changing the way academics teach poetry. And not only because it’s breaking laws. It’s because the poetry is damn good.
The best sort of commons.
Library
by Albert Goldbarth
This book saved my life.
This book takes place on one of the two small tagalong moons of Mars.
This book requests its author’s absolution, centuries after his death.
This book required two of the sultan’s largest royal elephants to bear it;
this other book fit in a gourd.
This book reveals The Secret Name of God, and so its author is on a death list.
This is the book I lifted high over my head, intending to smash a roach in
my girlfriend’s bedroom; instead, my back unsprung, and I toppled
painfully into her bed, where I stayed motionless for eight days.
This is a “book.” That is, an audio cassette. This other “book” is a screen
and a microchip. This other “book,” the sky.
In chapter three of this book, a woman tries explaining her husband’s
tragically humiliating death to their daughter: reading it is like walking
through a wall of setting cement.
This book taught me everything about sex.
This book is plagiarized.
This book is transparent; this book is a codex in Aztec; this book, written
by a prisoner, in dung; the wind is turning the leaves of this book: a
hill-top olive as thick as a Russian novel.
This book is a vivisected frog, and ova its text.
This book was dictated by Al-Méllikah, the Planetary Spirit of the Seventh
Realm, to his intermediary on Earth (the Nineteenth Realm), who
published it, first in mimeograph, and many editions later in gold-
stamped leather.
This book taught me everything wrong about sex.
This book poured its colors into my childhood so strongly, they remain a
dye in my imagination today.
This book is by a poet who makes me sick.
This is the first book in the world.
This is a photograph from Viet Nam, titled “Buddhist nuns copying
scholarly Buddhist texts in the pagoda.”
This book smells like salami.
This book is continued in volume two.
He was driving — evidently by some elusive, interior radar, since he was
busy reading a book propped on the steering wheel.
This book picks on men.
This is the split Red Sea: two heavy pages.
In this book I underlined deimos, cabochon, pelagic, hegira. I wanted to use
them.
This book poured its bile into my childhood.
This book defames women.
This book was smuggled into the country one page at a time, in tiny pill
containers, in hatbands, in the cracks of asses; sixty people risked their
lives repeatedly over this one book.
This book is nuts!!!
This book cost more than a seven-story chalet in the Tall Oaks subdivision.
This book — I don’t remember.
This book is a hoax, and a damnable lie.
This chapbook was set in type and printed by hand, by Larry Levis’s then-
wife, the poet Marcia Southwick, in 1975. It’s 1997 now and Larry’s
dead — too early, way too early — and this elliptical, heartbreaking poem
(which is, in part, exactly about too early death) keeps speaking to me
from its teal-green cover: the way they say the nails and the hair
continue to grow in the grave.
This book is two wings and a thorax the size of a sunflower seed.
This book gave me a hard-on.
This book is somewhere under those other books way over there.
This book deflected a bullet.
This book provided a vow I took.
If they knew you owned this book, they’d come and get you; it wouldn’t
be pretty.
This book is a mask: its author isn’t anything like it.
This book is by William Matthews, a wonderful poet, who died today, age
55. Now Larry Levis has someone he can talk to.
This book is an “airplane book” (but not about airplanes; mean to be read on
an airplane; also, available every three steps in the airport). What does it
mean, to “bust” a “block”?
This is the book I pretended to read one day in the Perry-Castañeda Library
browsing room, but really I was rapt in covert appreciation of someone
in a slinky skirt that clung like kitchen plasticwrap. She squiggled near,
and pointed to the book. “It’s upside-down,” she said.
For the rest of the afternoon I was so flustered, that when I finally left the
library… this is the book, with its strip of magnetic-code tape, that I
absentmindedly walked with through the security arch on the first day of
its installation, becoming the first (though unintentional) lightfingered
lifter of books to trigger the Perry-Castañeda alarm, which hadn’t been
fine-tuned as yet, and sounded even louder than the sirens I remember
from grade school air raid drills, when the principal had us duck beneath
our desks and cover our heads — as if gabled — with a book.
The chemical formulae for photosynthesis: this book taught me that.
And this book taught me what a “merkin” is.
The cover of this book is fashioned from the tanned skin of a favorite slave.
This book is inside a computer now.
This “book” is made of knotted string; and this, of stone; and this, the gut
of a sheep.
This book existed in a dream of mine, and only there.
This book is a talk-show paperback with shiny gold raised lettering on the
cover. (Needless to say, not one by me.)
This is a book of prohibitions; this other, a book of rowdy license. They
serve equally to focus the prevalent chaos of our lives.
This book is guarded around the clock by men in navy serge and golden
braiding, carrying very capable guns.
This is the book that destroyed a marriage. Take it, burn it, before it costs
us more.
This book is an intercom for God.
This book I slammed against a wall.
My niece wrote this book in crayon and glitter.
This is the book (in a later paperback version) by which they recognized
the sea-bleached, battered, and otherwise-unidentifiable body of Shelley.
Shit: I forgot to send in the card, and now the Book Club has billed me
twice for Synopses of 400 Little-Known Operas.
This book is filled with sheep and rabbits, calmly promenading in their
tartan vests and bowties, with their clay pipes, in their Easter Sunday
salad-like hats. The hills are gently rounded. The sun is a clear firm
yolk. The world will never be this sweetly welcoming again.
This book is studded with gems that have the liquid depth of aperitifs.
This book, 1,000 Wild Nights, is actually wired to give an electr/ YOWCH!
This book I stole from Cornell University’s Olin Library in the spring of
1976. Presumably, its meter’s still running. Presumably, it still longs for
its Dewey’d place in the dim-lit stacks.
This book has a bookplate reminding me, in Latin, to use my scant time well.
It’s the last day of the semester. My students are waiting to sell their
textbooks back to the campus store, like crazed racehorses barely
restrained at the starting gate.
This book caused a howl / a stir / a ruckus / an uproar.
This book became a movie; they quickly raised the cover price.
This book is the Key to the Mysteries.
This book has a bookplate: a man and a woman have pretzeled themselves into one lubricious shape.
This book came apart in my hands.
This book is austere; it’s like holding a block of dry ice.
This Bible is in Swahili.
This book contains seemingly endless pages of calculus — it may as well be
in Swahili.
This is the book I pretended to read while Ellen’s lushly naked body
darkened into sleep beside me. And this is the book I pretended to read
in a waiting room, once, as a cardiac specialist razored into my father’s
chest. And THIS book I pretended having read once, when I
interviewed for a teaching position: “Oh yes,” I said, “of course,” and
spewed a stream of my justly famous golden bullshit into the conference
room.
This book was signed by the author fifteen minutes before she died.
This is Erhard Ratdolf’s edition of Johann Regiomontanus’s astronomical
and astrological calendar (1476) — it contains “the first true title-page.”
She snatched this book from a garbage can, just as Time was about to
swallow it out of the visible world irrevocably. To this day, her
grandchildren read it.
This book: braille. This one: handmade paper, with threads of the poet’s
own bathrobe as part of the book’s rag content. This one: the cover is
hollowed glass, with a goldfish swimming around the title.
This is my MFA thesis. Its title is Goldbarth’s MFA Thesis.
This is the cookbook used by Madame Curie. It still faintly glows, seven
decades later.
This book is the shame of an entire nation.
This book is one of fourteen matching volumes, like a dress parade.
This is the book I’m writing now. It’s my best! (But where should I send
it?)
This book doesn’t do anyth / oh wow, check THIS out!
This is the book I bought for my nephew, 101 Small Physics Experiments.
Later he exchanged it for The Book of Twerps and Other Pukey Things, and
who could blame him?
This book is completely marred by the handiwork of the Druckfehlerteufel —
“the imp who supplies the misprints.”
This book has a kind of aurora-like glory radiating from it. There should be
versions of uranium detectors that register glory-units from books.
We argued over this book in the days of the divorce. I kept it, she kept the
stained glass window from Mike and Mimi.
Yes, he was supposed to be on the 7:05 to Amsterdam. But he stayed at
home, to finish this whodunit. And so he didn’t crash.
This book has a browned corsage pressed in it. I picked up both for a dime
at the Goodwill.
“A diet of berries, vinegar, and goat’s milk” will eventually not only cure
your cancer, but will allow a man to become impregnated (diagrams
explain this) — also, there’s serious philosophy about Jews who control
“the World Order,” in this book.
This book reads from right to left. This book comes with a small wooden
top attached by a saffron ribbon. This book makes the sound of a lion, a
train, or a cuckoo clock, depending on where you press its cover.
I’ve always admired this title from 1481: The Myrrour of the Worlde.
This book is from the 1950s; the jacket says it’s “a doozie.”
This book is by me. I found it squealing piteously, poor piglet, in the back
of a remainders bin. I took it home and nursed it.
This book let me adventure with the Interplanetary Police.
I threw myself, an aspirant, against the difficult theories this book
propounded, until my spirit was bruised. I wasn’t any smarter — just
bruised.
This book is magic. There’s more inside it than outside.
This is the copy of the Iliad that Alexander the Great took with him,
always, on his expeditions — “in,” Thoreau says, “a precious casket.”
Help! (thump) I’ve been stuck in this book all week and I don’t know how
to get out! (thump)
This is the book of poetry I read from at my wedding to Morgan. We were
divorced. The book (Fred Chappell’s River) is still on my shelf, like an
admonishment.
This book is stapled (they’re rusted by now); this book, bound in buttery
leather; this book’s pages are chemically-treated leaves; this book, the
size of a peanut, is still complete with indicia and an illustrated colophon
page.
So tell me: out of what grim institution for the taste-deprived and the
sensibility-challenged do they find the cover artists for these books?
This book I tried to carry balanced on my head with seven others.
This book I actually licked.
This book — remember? I carved a large hole in its pages, a “how-to
magazine for boys” said this would be a foolproof place to hide my
secret treasures. Then I remembered I didn’t have any secret treasures
worth hiding. Plus, I was down one book.
This book is nothing but jackal crap; unfortunately, its royalties have paid
for two Rolls-Royces and a mansion in the south of France.
This book is said to have floated off the altar of the church, across the
village square, and into the hut of a peasant woman in painful labor.
This is what he was reading when he died. The jacket copy says it’s “a real
page-turner — you can’t put it down!” I’m going to assume he’s in
another world now, completing the story.
This book hangs by a string in an outhouse, and every day it gets thinner.
This book teaches you how to knit a carrying case for your rosary; this one,
how to build a small but lethal incendiary device.
This book has pop-up pages with moveable parts, intended to look like the
factory room where pop-up books with moveable parts are made.
If you don’t return that book I loaned you, I’m going to smash your face.
This book says the famously saintly woman was really a ringtailed trash-
mouth dirty-down bitch queen. Everyone’s reading it!
There are stains in this book that carry a narrative greater than its text.
The Case of _______. How to _______. Books books books.
I know great petulant stormy swatches and peaceful lulls of this book by
heart.
I was so excited, so jazzed up! — but shortly thereafter they found me
asleep, over pages six and seven of this soporific book. (I won’t say by
who.)
And on her way back to her seat, she fell (the multiple sclerosis) and
refused all offered assistance. Instead, she used her book she’d been
reading from, as a prop, and worked herself pridefully back up to a
standing position.
They gave me this book for free at the airport. Its cover features an Indian
god with the massive head of an elephant, as brightly blue as a druid,
flinging flowers into the air and looking unsurpassably wise.
My parents found this book in my bottom drawer, and spanked the living
hell into my butt.
This book of yours, you tell me, was optioned by Hollywood for eighty-
five impossibajillion dollars? Oh. Congratulations.
They lowered the esteemed and highly-published professor into his grave.
A lot of silent weeping. A lot of elegiac rhetoric. And one man shaking
his head in the chill December wind dumbfoundedly, who said, “And he
perished anyway.”
Although my 8th grade English teacher, Mrs. Hurd, always said “Whenever
you open a book, remember: that author lives again.”
After this book, there was no turning back.
Around 1000 A.D., when the Magyars were being converted over to
Christianity, Magyar children were forced to attend school for the first
time in their cultural history: “therefore the Magyar word konyv means
tears as well as book.”
This book, from when I was five, its fuzzy ducklings, and my mother’s
voice in the living room of the second-story apartment over the butcher
shop on Division Street…. I’m fifty now. I’ve sought out, and I own
now, one near-mint and two loose, yellowing copies that mean to me as
much as the decorated gold masks and the torsos of marble meant to the
excavators of Troy.
This book is done.
This book gave me a paper cut.
This book set its mouth on my heart, and sucked a mottled tangle of blood
to the surface.
I open this book and smoke pours out, I open this book and a bad sleet
slices my face, I open this book: brass knuckles, I open this book: the
spiky scent of curry, I open this book and hands grab forcefully onto my
hair as if in violent sex, I open this book: the wingbeat of a seraph, I
open this book: the edgy cat-pain wailing of the damned thrusts up in a
column as sturdy around as a giant redwood, I open this book: the travel
of light, I open this book and it’s as damp as a wound, I open this book
and I fall inside it farther than any physics, stickier than the jelly we
scrape from cracked bones, cleaner than what we tell our children in the
dark when they’re afraid to close their eyes at night.
And this book can’t be written yet: its author isn’t born yet.
This book is going to save the world.
