Tag Archives: library

Bookish decisions

In the past two weeks, I’ve read two contemporary poetry collections that I didn’t, er…love…or perhaps what I mean is I did not respond to them the way I enjoy responding to poems (and no, I will not be naming titles, though I will be giving these books away). While that is a let-down of sorts, I also started reading naturalist Marcia Bonta‘s Appalachian Autumn–which I do love. The book takes an environmental-diary approach that I have enjoyed in other naturalist writers’ work and which, no doubt, I relate to partly because I am also a near-daily diarist of my own backyard; Bonta has much to teach me, because she has a naturalist’s education and long experience. This is one of four Appalachian Seasons books she’s authored, and maybe I should have started with Spring, since that equinox has just passed. I found myself interested in the story this book tells of her family’s legal struggles with local lumbermen and absentee landlords, however. It’s an experience with which, sadly, my beloveds and I are familiar.

And I also began reading a book of poetry I have found exceptionally compelling–Rebecca Elson’s A Responsibility to Awe. Perhaps more on that in a future post. So books continue to enrich my life. I hope that is always the case, but I’ve seen how changes in human neuroplasticity can affect even the most bookish among us. More reason never to take the joys of reading for granted–and to keep my library card current.

~

In future, I plan to use the library card more than the credit card when it comes to books; but I know I’m weak. Besides, many of the small or indie press poetry books I relish are not easy to find in public library collections. One of my priorities this year is to winnow the home bookshelf stacks, to keep only what I really cannot bear to part with or am sure I will read or refer to again. But how can I be sure? The book lover’s dilemma, isn’t it? Nonetheless, there are definitely texts I can part with if I just take the necessary time to go through the collection. I can donate them to a public library, and even though many of them won’t get curated onto those shelves, at least I will be supporting an institution I value. I have been referring to this process of lightening my bookshelf loads as “culling,” but that word tends to have a negative connotation. I’d like to remind myself of the positive aspects of giving some of my books away: good for me, good for other readers, good for the authors of these books whose work may be discovered by other readers. Less to pack if we ever move, less for my children to deal with when that time comes. Yeah, I’m thinking ahead.

Thysanura

The bristletails (order thysanura) are a group of wingless insects that includes Lepisma saccharina, the silverfish–one of the most common “bookworms,” although they are not worms! They nestle between pages, covers, and bindings of books, though books are certainly not all they eat. I must confess they are not among my favorite arthropods. Nonetheless, I class myself as a bookworm, though I’m far less voracious than some folks I know.

Therefore, I ought to note that my office on campus has been moved to my favorite place: the library! As I noted in some long-ago posts, libraries have been among my comfortable places ever since I was almost too young to read, and my maternal grandmother volunteered at her local library (notably as “The Story Lady.”) I still recall the jingle–from the 1960s–that accompanied a PSA for the library I loved as a 5-to-7-year-old.

~

ann e michael
The South Whitley Library as it was in 1967, with my grandmother in her Story Lady attire.

Anyway, it has longed seemed logical that the campus writing center be located where research takes place; we just had to find room. The library staff generously donated one quite spacious office room for the college writing center, and I couldn’t be more pleased!

My colleagues in academic support–my university department–are still housed in the basement of the main classroom building. I miss them, and they envy the fact that I now have a window (and that it’s not freezing up here). But while I would never knock the value of a window after 15 years under the frost line, I’m happiest about having my work office located in my favorite building on campus: the library. Books make me comfortable. When I need a break from my computer screen or from meetings, I can take a deep breath and walk around the stacks in silence. It’s perfectly acceptable to be rather introverted in a library. And the people who surround me are as enthusiastic about books as I am.

I plan to take a short breather from blogging and work-related stuff to visit a far-away Best Beloved and am already plotting which paperbacks to pack for the tedious flights. I hope to avoid silverfish and viral stowaways. Wish me luck.

Meanwhile, embrace your inner bookworm!

I searched for the most attractive photo of a silverfish I could find, and this one came from Encyclopaedia Britannica. Sorry, it was the best I could do. I’m sure another silverfish would find this one quite handsome. To the human bookworms I know: this is not meant to deride those of us who digest books with a healthy appetite. Just a metaphor!

Home is where?

Yesterday morning, I went to a local library to attend a writing workshop on the theme of ‘home.’ In my own work, when I stop to consider themes that recur, some form of dwelling appears in image and topic. Frequently. Nests, burrows, houses, cities, places. Love, death, kinship, the natural environment, and home. My first book* used the process of housebuilding as its motivating metaphor for perfectly natural reasons (we were indeed building a house), but both before and after that group of poems, the theme of home has been a common one I have felt drawn to describe.

Even, now I think of it, the body as home: this structure of flesh and bones and blood and synapses that houses my consciousness.

My parents left their homes and families, and when I was a child we moved three or four times–not enough to feel any loss of stability but enough not to feel particularly rooted to any one place. I suppose I can say that I carry home with me, in my sense of being a conscious body in a space surrounded by an environment about which I am curious. I do not, however, feel rooted to a culture, community, or extended family who live in one region; I have no region, city, state, place, house that I claim as mine and refer to when I refer to myself. Among the ten people in the workshop yesterday, I was a bit of an outlier in that respect. Some of the participants felt split between two homes/places, others felt rooted, and still others had felt rooted but were feeling the connections break.

I found it hard to say where my home is. Maybe it’s imaginary? Portable? I used to daydream about living in an Airstream trailer. Though I’d need a second one just for books…

Airstream Corp.

~

Which brings to mind something one of the workshop attendees said about feeling at home in a library. Several of us nodded in agreement, and he added that the library–the public library–functions as a kind of matrix. I would add that’s true for one’s private library, as well, books providing a kind of collage of interests and influences and teachings that can be seen as a kind of matrix to the book-collector’s consciousness, loves, and interests. Speaking strictly for me, in this case.

The house I have inhabited for nearly 25 years now, the house my Beloved and I designed, helped to build, inhabited, raised our children in: this is as close to a ‘true home’ as I have ever had. And yet: is it my home, my rooted place, my last place, the dwelling-in I must have to feel stable and secure and surrounded by love and nature? I’m not so certain about that.

It’s beautiful here, especially in springtime. Yet as I consider friends and students and strangers who have had to pick up and leave on short notice, possibly never to return–it would be hard, but I could leave home. And, for now at least, I still have a choice to go or stay.

~~

*If you are interested in reading that first poetry collection, it is called More Than Shelter. It’s out of print, but you can contact me and I’ll send you one for $8.00 including postage. Many thanks.

Curation

Recently, I spent awhile browsing the Walter Kerr collection of books in the library of the college that employs me. Kerr and his wife Jean were writers in New York in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s; he was best known as a theater critic and she as a playwright and essayist. His family donated his books to the school, and it occurred to me during my perusal that this section of the stacks seems more personal than the collection as a whole. Here are Kerr’s quirky book choices, his favored influences, his academic interests with a place among the trendier tomes on movies and Broadway.

A personal library acts as a unit, books that are kept together rather than disbursed upon the death (or before-death donation) of the book collector. It therefore parallels–and predates, of course–the social media concept of the curated self:

Through the ongoing process of organizing content and media elements which create personal profiles for specific audiences, social media users inadvertently curate versions of themselves. Social media turns users into curators as they create distinct incarnations that are separate, yet become the objectified digital presentation of one’s physical self. [definition from socialcurators at weebly]

“Curating” seems to be a trending concept these days, so I naturally checked the etymology:

derives from cure: c. 1300, “care, heed,” from Latin cura “care, concern, trouble,” with many figurative extensions, such as “study; administration; a mistress,” and also “means of healing, remedy,” from Old Latin coira–, a noun of unknown origin. Meaning “medical care” is late 14c. (https://www.etymonline.com)

Among those “many figurative extensions” is the curator in the sense of library science or museum administration. Now we can add social media users to the extension metaphors.

Perhaps curating oneself is more natural than I initially thought. My library probably offers a means of knowing who I am, or at any rate what I choose to value given what I have learned in my past; what we leave behind–as in Mr. Kerr’s library collection–becomes who we may be to others.

If they study, if they speculate, if they care.

While I was at the library, I borrowed a few books (of course). I will write about Arthur Frank’s classic book The Wounded Storyteller soon, I hope, in conjunction with some poems I’ve been working on. I also borrowed poetry collections by Matthea Harvey, Rachel Hadas, and Larry Levis.

Am I curating my life?

~~

~~

 

Support for poetry

It is April, and April is National Poetry Month, among many other things that April is.

2017npm-poster_0People have told me that poetry has helped them through times of fear and times of grief. That’s a familiar response when, on rare occasion, I happen to tell someone I am a poet. The thing is–I am not sure poems do that for me. Maybe writing poems helps, but reading them sometimes hurts even more.

Not that hurt is such a bad thing when one is grieving; there is the comforting recognition that sorrow is a shared experience, that others have been through and survived pain and sadness, that there is a community of Others who feel compassion and who can express it well and honestly. Too, there are poets I find myself reading when I just need to hear a familiar voice in my head. That familiarity in itself offers a kind of comfort to this reader.

This week, I am turning to familiar poetry voices although I am reading collections I have not read before. Jane Hirshfield, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry. “Old friends” of mine.

I am not contributing to National Poetry Month much this year: I am giving no readings and attending only a few. My contribution this year is to book-buying: I have made several purchases of books by poets I do not know well or who are completely new to me.

Book-purchasing from small independent presses and through the poets themselves–not through Amazon, not second-hand–supports poets and poetry publishers. Another way to support poets is to borrow poetry books from your public library, so that the books are noted as “circulating” and thus are less likely to be culled when the library updates its collection.

Love can be expressed and shared in many forms. I ❤ poetry!

Revisiting

Read more poems, I advised myself. At first, I thought I might scout around for some writers whose work I am unfamiliar with–writers new (say, Ocean Vuong) and less new (say, Alberta Turner). I have the week off from university work, however, and am lazing about at home…no trips to the library.

I do have my own library, though, much of which consists of poetry collections and much of which I have not read in some time. I chose Audre Lorde off the shelf–her 1986 book Our Dead behind Us. Lorde’s work was pivotal to my early interest in writing poems; I encountered her in a Women’s Literature Studies class in 1978 and was deeply moved by her poems of rage and political awareness, the sensuousness of her imagery.

I chose to re-read some late Plath and one of Adam Zagajewski‘s books, Canvas. What I’m hoping is that some of these re-reads will connect me to areas in poetry I have not explored much recently. Also, I will expand into the works of writers whose poetry I’m less familiar with.

Not to mention the recent work of friends-in-poetry, whom I have let down by not buying their books (yet…I will get to it). So many excellent and thought-provoking writers out there, many of whom I know personally or have at very least met in person and connected via social media platforms. I hope to purchase some of those books at this year’s AWP Conference in Washington, D.C., and thus to keep to my commitment to read more poetry.

Meanwhile, I turn the pages and rediscover “old friends” and their voices, stories, moods. That is a pleasant task, and a fruitful and useful one.

~

brad-hammonds-flikr-books

Reading as drug

“…Let us admit that reading with us is just a drug we cannot do without–who of this band does not know the restlessness that attacks him when he has been severed from reading too long, the apprehension and irritability, and the sigh of relief which the sight of a printed page extracts from him?–and so let us be no more vainglorious than the poor slaves of the hypodermic needle or the pint-pot.”  ~ W. Somerset Maugham, “The Book-Bag”

azaleas by Ann E. Michael

In June and July, my situation lets up enough that I am not in my office 40 hours a week and can, for a time, attend to the garden or the hiking trail or avail myself of more time to read. Yesterday, I browsed through the campus library and came away with seven or eight books. How I loved that feeling when I was a child: walking through the stacks, thumbing through card catalogues, picking and choosing, now with deliberation, now with impulse, until I had reached the borrowing limit!

It is, in a way, a kind of addiction, though for the past three decades I have been a bit more studied and less compulsive in my reading habits. A bit. Plants and animals, and the workings and seasons of the garden, are my alternate texts when the printed page is unavailable or my eyes feel tired. Certainly I read on-screen quite often, but that process is not nearly as fulfilling. I have downloaded a book by Deleuze (Difference and Repetition) as a kind of experiment; I’m not at all sure that philosophy will be comfortable to read on screen, but I suspect I might prefer reading philosophy on a computer than reading a novel on a computer.

For me, the worst thing about onscreen reading, as I possess neither laptop nor tablet computer, is the inability to stretch on a lounge chair or curl up on a sofa (or, best of all, in a hammock) while reading. And the pleasant experience of leaf-shadows gently caressing the off-white pages of a paper book, the tone of the paper shifting ever slightly as the light changes, the sensation of dozing off with a book over one’s face when the sun gets hot…book addicts find these aspects as enjoyable as the intellectual response to the material, the words themselves.

Several significant events & celebrations appear on this summer’s horizon, but with any luck I can employ my library cards to good purpose a few more times before the fall semester arrives.

 

 

Here’s something lovely

…from Maria Popova at the Brainpickings site: book loving and writing and art and literacy and library connect to produce this event/display at the New York Public Library. I was in the city just last week–rats, I missed this. (But I did see Ken Price at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and spent part of a lovely afternoon at Untermyer Park again).

~ Please click on the links! (I know they’re kind of hard to see on this theme)~

MEANWHILE…

I’m on blogging hiatus again while I get accustomed to my work week and while we prepare for the Goschenhoppen Folk Festival (or on Facebook here) this coming Friday and Saturday. Not a time to get much writing done, nor much reading.

A festival participant prepares apples for drying

A festival participant (19th c) prepares apples for drying

Young apprentices (18th c) at work

Young apprentices (18th c) at work

Poetry, art, & a little bit more about libraries

After writing about some memorable libraries lately, I realize that I have been able to pursue my passions–indeed, discover my passions–largely through the help of these marvelous civic institutions. It is time I brought my posts back to those passions, however, particularly to my love of poetry.

My family introduced me to poetry through nursery rhymes and hymns and taught me to love narratives through story-telling of several kinds, so the foundation for my lifelong love of stories and poems existed before I ever set foot in a library; but books solidified and focused my various enthusiasms, and libraries offered more books than I could hope to read (though I tried!). Libraries led me not only to novels and poems but to books on visual art, art museums, artists, art history, and art criticism. If I couldn’t get to the Louvre or Rijksmuseum, to Venice or to Rome, I could borrow an art book from the library and be on my way via imagination.

When I got to college, I spent many hours in the library on campus borrowing books I couldn’t afford to buy. Few of those books were required for my academic studies; in fact, I don’t recall doing much research for term papers. I was reading up on and diversifying my own interests, often unrelated to coursework. A look back at my undergraduate transcripts reveals only two classes specifically devoted to poetry, but I recall reading many poetry collections in the campus library. As a junior, I had a work-study job in an office in the library basement. When my hours were up, I’d walk upstairs to the stacks.

I was finding my own way to what I loved.

~

Needless to say, once I had children of my own, we visited the library often. Years ago, I wrote to the poet Richard Wilbur to tell him about my 2nd-grade daughter’s encounter with Digging for China and how, nearly 30 years earlier, I had been fascinated by the book too. He replied with this modest note. June 2009, I saw Wilbur at the West Chester Poetry Conference. What a talented writer, and what a sweet man.

~

Richard Wilbur