The UPS guy just showed up, looking as he always does, somewhere between a squat version of Patrick Stewart & a shorter David Antin, lugging in his arms the carton of books I acquired at Small Press Distribution (SPD) while I was in Berkeley. I now finally can put together the third part of my three-part “books over a two-week trip” scenario, joining the roster of books acquired while out west below with the list I posted on July 29 of those I took with me to read while I was there and the list I posted August 2^nd of books & journals that came in the mail while I was gone.

 

I will admit that I’ve been spoiled. I had a house for six years just one block from SPD when I last lived in Berkeley & when they moved (after I’d headed east to Chester County, PA), they relocated to within walking distance of where I grew up. Considering the lack of books in my own home when I was a kid, I was incredibly fortunate to find myself in the best city in the United States for locating contemporary poetry. Of course, it wasn’t always that way. I’m old enough to remember when Fred Cody’s bookstore was a tiny place in North Berkeley (there is a Fat Apple’s restaurant there now) & old enough to recall when Peter Howard & Jack Shoemaker started Serendipity Books on Shattuck. Peter still owns Serendipity, though it’s moved since. SPD was originally a part of Serendipity, spun off decades ago & recreated as a non-profit. And Jack took the new book retail operation off to become Sand Dollar in Albany (which closed after Jack went off to run North Point Press, only to become re-emerge in part as Black Oak Books). All of which is to say that I still shop at SPD very much the way I did back in the 1960s at Serendipity, going shelf by shelf, finding little treasures, limiting myself so as not to go over budget. Not all of the books in this list were acquired at SPD, I should note. Some were picked up at Green Apple Books, Cody’s, Modern Times & the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art or were given to me by their authors or editors. But – bottom line – it’s worth the plane ticket to shop at SPD in person.

 

·         Cunt-Ups, Dodie Bellamy

·         Indictable Suborners, David Bromige

·         Bleeding Optimist, Mary Burger

·         Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy, Carolyn Burke

·         Baffling Means, Clark Coolidge & Philip Guston

·         A Handmade Museum, Brenda Coultas

·         Rules of the House, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

·         The Cloud of Knowable Things, Elaine Equi

·         Young Robert Duncan: Portrait of the Poet as Homosexual in Society, Ekbert Faas

·         Philip Guston Retrospective, Philip Guston

·         Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Interest, Anselm Hollo

·         Dreaming the Miracle: Three French Prose Poets, Max Jacob, Francis Ponge, Jean Follain

·         Three Poems, Stephen Jonas

·         What is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde, Daniel Kane

·         Mirage #4 / Period(ical) #107, edited by Kevin Killian & Dodie Bellamy

·         Margaret & Dusty, Alice Notley

·         Eureka, A Prose Poem, Edgar Allan Poe

·         Present Tense, Stephen Ratcliffe

·         How to Do Things with Words, Joan Retallack

·         The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence, Leslie Scalapino

·         Defoe, Leslie Scalapino

·         Enough, edited by Leslie Scalapino & Rick London

·         Music or Honesty, Rod Smith

·         Little Casino, Gilbert Sorrentino

·         Miss America, Catherine Wagner

·         Goof Book, Philip Whalen

That, for me, is a year’s reading. But it won’t even make a visible difference to the stacks of unread books in my bedroom (which have more or less overwhelmed & buried the bookcase that was set aside for books-still-to-read). And as I type this, the mailman comes by & hands me a copy of Gregg Biglieri’s Reading Keats to Sleep, as beautiful a letterpress “book” as one could imagine. So I sit right down and read it.