Lawrence Rozanski, who is a student at Villanova just down the road, sent me an email that really made me stop and think. Here’s his message:

 

Mr. Silliman,

 

I read your blog almost everyday and, in addition to your own writing, I'm often struck by the frequency with which things arrive for you in the mail, or the ease with which you'll refer to grabbing a title off a stack of unread books. I remember you going into some detail about the system you've worked out for reading several posts back — I think it had something to do with different shelves in different locations around your house? — but I don't ever recall you commenting at length on the nature and enterprise of actually acquiring your collection, and I was hoping that you might consider on this topic, both in terms of how it has applied to your education and on going work as a poet, as well as how it has shaped, informed, dictated, over-determined, etc. your practices and habits as a reader. Speaking from personal experience, I've found that the practice of writing has always been, at least for me, predicated on a set of answers to what I'll call the "question of reading," with writing qua writing drawing its sense of distinction and, most crucially, gaining its entrée into relevant discourses, under the aegis of one's rather banal choices as a reader — where to shop, what to shop for, what to pass over, how to go about reading, what ends one envisions as the appropriate outcomes of reading, the place one reserves for the practice of reading in the course of a daily or weekly routine, etc. Granted, one way of answering these questions is to retreat into the unrevealingly banal ("I like to do all my shopping at X," or "Such-and-such press's catalog is the best place to look for material on Y."), but if we can push past the temptation to simply recite our specific habits and, instead, try to arrive at some understanding of how these habits matter, I think you arrive at a very interesting (and often neglected) question in modern poetics.

 

Anyway, if you can find the time or inclination, consider talking a little about this on your blog. I'd be very interested in anything you had to say.

 

Lawrence Rozanski

 

There are really two, or maybe three, questions here, all interesting to think about. One has to do with the creation, shaping & upkeep of a poet’s library, a second – really where I think Rozanski is going with this – is a question of the relation of reading’s narrative to one’s mental map of The Territory, whatever it might be, of what poetry has been, is (&, by implication at least, should or could be), and of how a poet might govern that, to the degree that it’s possible.

 

More than 35 years ago, I was surprised to discover, when visiting the home of a School of Quietude poet with whom I was then friendly (& whose early books, in particular, I’m still fond of, tho we’ve long since lost touch), only to discover that he owned almost no books. “I don’t keep them,” he told me, tho he did in fact appear to be a steady enough reader. The man was then employed in an MFA program at one of those state universities that sprung up like weeds during the GI-bill funded 1950s, especially out west where new metropolitan areas were expanding rapidly.* At the time, I wondered how, if he passed on or discarded everything he read, his own children could ever stumble across some serendipitous find that would shape or change their lives. That seemed to me surreal since at least one of my motivations for writing poetry was to propel myself as far, culturally & intellectually, from the book-starved environment of my own childhood as I could imagine.

 

My own “system,” as Rozanski generously characterizes it, really amounts to mounds & piles & some bookcases that are, at least modestly, divided into categories (poetry, nonfiction, unread & fiction are the four main groupings). But how did I get to this particular set of books & what does it mean (e.g., the nonfiction books – really mostly theory, history, science, philosophy & art books – are up in the bookcases in the living room upstairs because they tend to be published by university or trade publishers & thus “look presentable” when the neighbors drop by, or least according to Krishna’s eye, contrasted with anarchic welter of papers that is any poetry collection that is dominated by small press books, chapbooks & publications that can strive toward chapbookdom)? Just how many of these “books” are little more than stapled collections of typewriter paper (regular or legal sized)? Some of which – say, Robert Kelly’s Axon Dendron Tree, whose top staple I have to push back in every time I open it, or Blaise Cendrar’s Kodak – are among the most influential in my library.

 

Which points right away to a major difference between a poetry collection & most other collections of literature. A significant portion of any good poetry library is going to consist of ragtag volumes from “micropublishers,” material that floats well under the radar even of SPD. I think of how Anselm Hollo has spoken of his days working for the BBC in London in the 1950s when it was, he alleges, possible to obtain virtually any small press book that was brought out in the United States & how radically different today’s circumstance is for any young writer. For one thing, there are so many more volumes now – I receive as many as 20 books in the mail each week & I still spend over $1,000 per year (sometimes double that) to ensure that I have the books I actually think I need. And while I used to “trim” my collection periodically when I lived in Berkeley, land of used bookstores, I haven’t done a “used book dump” in the nearly nine years I’ve lived in Pennsylvania, in good part because I have spent so much money in recent years buying books that I had previously owned & once thought I no longer needed (e.g., where are my Frank Samperi volumes? If I need them again, I’ll have to buy them at rare book prices. I spent far too much money this past year reacquiring many of the books of Harold Dull under just such circumstances.).

 

But I was lucky. Unbelievably so. My family settled in the Berkeley area in the 19^th century, when the University of California (UC) was a relatively rural campus. The fact that the only books in my own house were the occasional Readers Digest condensed novels – invariably three to a volume – plus The Book of Knowledge, a low-end encyclopedia my mother had purchased out of some sense of my brother & I needing access to information, was not the sort of handicap that it might have been had I grown up, for example, in Rock Springs, Wyoming, or out in Lodi where my grandfather’s brother had become the mayor. While Albany – the particular Berkeley suburb I grew up in – was part of the intense economic segregation of the East Bay in the 1950s, meaning that no UC faculty would have been caught dead living in what was then a rabid center for John Birch-style rightwing politics, there were quite a few UC administrative staff living there who didn’t have the economic means of the faculty but who were, in their own ways, intellectuals. They could afford the smaller homes of petit-bourgeois Albany more easily than Berkeley & more than a couple of like-minded folks ended up teaching in the Albany school system. I had a student teacher, Ken Davids, when I was a senior who (a) published a novel with Grove Press & (b) was then married to fine press printer Betsy Davids. I had a ninth-grade soc teacher, Phil Elwood, who had had a jazz program on Pacifica radio for decades. One girlfriend were the daughter of UC staff.

 

The town library was an important institution in my growing up. From my mother’s perspective, anything that separated my brother and I from my often-psychotic grandmother on the weekends was a resource to grab onto, especially given the 1100 square feet that the three generations shared under one roof in our house. Thus bowling leagues, swimming lessons & always a few hours every Saturday at the Albany public library. I’ve written before of discovering William Carlos Williams’ The Desert Music, & of coming to poetry, as a direct result.

 

However, an important part of the evolution of my library from that point forward can be traced back to the fact that I didn’t really go to college straight out of high school. Rather, I took what really amounted to a couple of years off, working part-time, taking a few classes at the local junior college, exploring the vocational possibilities of recreational pharmaceuticals in the rapidly growing East Bay market. It was during this period that I first got serious about my writing & tried to publish. It was also when I half-attended the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965 – half-attended because I couldn’t afford the full admission & frankly didn’t know who all these people were. I’d never heard of Charles Olson or Jack Spicer or Robert Duncan, tho I did know enough to have heard of Ginsberg. I would hang out a lot on Telegraph Avenue, a prototype of what would now be seen as a street person, watching Kenneth Irby writing seriously into notebooks at Café Mediterranean & a friend, Davy Smith-Margen, would introduce me to some of his acquaintances, one of them a Skyline High senior by the name of Barrett Watten. Another friend from that period was Wesley Tanner, now a fine press printer in Michigan, but then a kid who was taking courses at Laney College just to learn printing.

 

It was during this period when I met Rochelle Nameroff, who became my first wife. At the time, she was a volunteer secretary for Jerry Rubin, who was planning the first anti-Vietnam teach-in in 1965. And it was Rochelle – Shelley – who convinced me to register at SF State in the writing program. She had a vision that campuses were going to be the center of sex, drugs & rock & roll – and politics – as the 1960s evolved & frankly she certainly had that right. When we got married on Halloween, 1965, I had to borrow money from Clifford Burke, poet & publisher, to pay the preacher. 

 

I see a lot of younger writers whose libraries really begin with whatever they were reading in college. By the time I really headed off to college at the age of 20, however, I was already a committed reader of Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley et al. & since I registered late that first semester & couldn’t get into many of the courses I sought (& was rejected by Leonard Wolf from the one writing workshop to which I’d submitted a manuscript), I had an abundance of free time & decided to literally read the SF State library American poetry collection A thru Z. I didn’t get all the way, as I recall, but I know I got as far as the many books of Tracy Thompson, the most widely published American poet of the 1960s. What I didn’t know at the time was the buyer for this section at SF State had been, more or less right up to the time when I arrived, Robin Blaser.

 

All of which is to say that by the time I reached college, I had a sense of what my reading needs were. Indeed, I picked classes by how they fit with the curriculum in my head, rather than the other way around – one major reason why I never finally finished my undergraduate degree after I switched over to Berkeley. Thus I chose a philosophy course on the grounds that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was the text, or because it used Bertrand Russell’s quirky history of philosophy. In retrospect, this could have been a dreadful way to go through school, reading so narrowly early on. Fortunately, one thing I did pick up from reading Olson & Pound was that poetry inevitably had to be situated in the world, that I needed all of these other discourses. However, even as a teenager, it was easy enough to see that a lot of Pound’s five foot bookshelf was taken up with cranks & that Olson’s own excavations into knowledge were similarly problematic. I was reading Wittgenstein before I got to college & trying to fathom Chomsky as well. But I was not systematic.

 

There were two books that I was introduced to in college – but just two – that really made a difference. One was Claude Leví-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques, which I actually ran into while working as a reader for an anthro class at Merritt College. The other was Roland Barthes Writing Degree Zero, which was part of the reading list in a tentative “new theory” graduate seminar Jim Breslin taught at Berkeley that I’d talked my way into. Two books for three plus years of college was not, frankly, a great return. The value of college, for me at least, was in the people I associated with there, whether teachers (Bob Grenier most importantly, but also Richard Bridgman, Jack Gilbert, Ed van Aelstyn & a few others) or fellow students (my friendships with David Melnick, Rae Armantrout & David Bromige all started when I was at UC).

 

After college, I found myself working in the prison movement for the next five years, then working on tenant issues in San Francisco’s Tenderloin for five more. It was during this period that I began to seriously write criticism for publication – for example, what I was doing when I first edited the Margins issue on the work of Clark Coolidge. Like a lot of campus politicos who were now doing community organizing, I had begun to read left political theory, history & sociology as a means of connecting what I was doing in the community to some sense of a larger struggle. Joining the New American Movement (NAM), an organization dominated by people with virtually the same background – campus antiwar work in the 1960s, fulltime community organizing in the ‘70s – that later merged with Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialists Organizing Committee (DSOC), I picked up on all the reading that passed through those circles – Fred Jameson, Stanley Aronowitz, Manuel Castells before he was writing on computing, Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe, early Terry Eagleton. These books led invariably to others – Benjamin, Marx, Adorno, Gramsci. 

 

Living with Barrett Watten on Potrero Hill in 1974 proved a pivotal experience for me in this regard. His constant questioning of all assumptions at all times forced me to demand a rigor of myself in my thinking to a degree that I’ve never experienced before or since – and rather than having two tracts of book buying, one “creative,” the other “political,” I came really to understand that they were in fact facets of a single larger discourse that if I just stood at the right angle, I could begin to glimpse the whole of.

 

That preposition seems a good place to stop for the day. Tomorrow, if I get the chance, I’ll tackle this from a different angle.

 

 

 

 

* This poet has published seven books, all with trade, university or “top tier” School of Quietude independent presses, taught at the same school for over thirty years & retired. Only two of his books remain in print. But it should be noted that he was quintessentially an MFA program creature who came of age “pre-theory” & who presumed his MFA program to be a theory-free zone.