While I was in California, Krishna bought a couple of 84” bookcases – one for each of us – to upgrade the four-foot high ones in our bedroom. I moved one of the latter down into the study and have spent much of the past weekend converting stacks of books on the floor into some semblance of order. Unread books of poetry takes up almost all of the new case in the bedroom, with just enough room for some of the unread critical texts that still won’t fit into the shelves in the livingroom.* It’s been nine years since we’ve added any new bookcases & I have not been on a book-buying moratorium of late.

 

One thing that always turns up when I engage in a project of this sort is some kind of snapshot of what I’m buying, but which I haven’t gotten around yet to reading. There’s a lot of John Ashbery & Clark Coolidge in the new bedroom bookcase – about five books of each. A lot of Mark Wallace (almost all in little chapbooks), lots of Leslie Scalapino, lots of Alice Notley. In some instances, like Wallace & Scalapino, this is really an index of how prolific each writer is at this point in their careers, but with Ashbery it’s more a sign of how very long it’s taking me to get around to his books. I’ve been struggling with Flow Chart since the summer, wanting it to be the transcendent long poem that seems to be locked up somewhere inside there, but which doesn’t ever quite get through the slack surfaces that seem to predominate that text.

 

An even more troubling category for me is the snapshot of those books that I’m buying over & over, and still not getting around to reading – I’ve come across second copies of at least 40 different books, tho thus far no third copies. On the other hand, I haven’t gotten the carton of items I bought when I was at SPD in Berkeley yet & I know already that one or two of those are duplicates of books already here. In a number of these cases, the situation is one where I buy the book only to receive a copy from either the author or publisher later on (in at least one case, it’s very clear that one Canadian publisher sent me two review copies, complete with press release & warm personal note from somebody I’d never heard of before). But as the SPD box will also prove, sometimes I really am just buying the same book over & over.

 

The most shocking discovery for me was just putting all of the books I’m currently in the middle of side by side – it takes an entire shelf! All the time I was in the middle of Flow Chart, I’d forgotten that I was halfway through Chinese Whispers. Next goal: cut the number of “in progress” books by half . . . or more.

 

This raises for me a question I’ve posed before, but one which feels more pressing as time goes by. I’d love to figure out how younger poets are handling it (or, for that matter, avoiding handling it): the absolute number of decent-to-great post-avant poets right now is literally in the several hundreds, if not thousands, without even delving too terribly deeply into parallel or similar traditions in other languages worldwide. It’s more than any human being can possibly handle, certainly not if one has a family and/or job.

 

Obviously, one solution is jettison wasting any further time on those tendencies in poetry that long since turned into dead ends, even if they continue to replicate themselves all over again in ever more self-parodic modes (e.g. the Mabel Dodge Festival). Farewell to the School of Quietude!

 

But the world of poetry I came into back in the mid-1960s was largely one conditioned by Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry & the re-emergence during those very same years of the Objectivists – and if I try to read every poet whose work could be traced back to these traditions alone, it would be an inconceivable task. Even if I try to restrict it to only those books that are excellent or better – how can I know that in advance? – there are more books than I will ever be able to read. Yet I really am interested pretty much in all of it, so the idea of how to carve out an intelligible niche, a subsegment of this wealth of writing, is one I ponder a lot.

 

The tendency of so many younger poets has been to be militantly anti-group formation, yet in a field of literally hundreds upon hundreds of younger poets (say, under 40), it seems very clear that this strategy serves almost none of them well at all. At the same time, this isn’t something you can fake, although the mock movement of new brutalism does a better job than most of denying their cake & having it also. The last attempt at something more rigorous or serious – the Apex of the M crowd, circa 1990 – seemed to dissolve the minute everybody groaned at its lack of good humor.

 

So what is to be done? Read only one’s friends? Read only “the larger” independent presses – as if they did a better job of selecting “the best” than does, say, FSG? How does one map the landscape? If ever there was a time when a Donald Allen could step forward and, with about three good ideas, completely shape the world, this is it. Just as clearly, that individual can’t be one of us geezers. It’s going to have to come from within – but the longer it takes, the more atomized & impossible the reading list(s) will become.

 

Finally, I can’t post a note like this without registering some kind of dismay at what I consider aggressively clueless behavior in book production. My favorite candidates for this are chapbooks with no words whatsoever on their covers – a great way to ensure that the writer inside never gets read – and oversized books that won’t fit reasonably into any ordinary bookshelf. Books that are 13 inches high or 11 by 4¼ inches aren’t reader friendly, and if they stick out, it’s in a pejorative sense. Weird bindings that injure neighboring books come next on the list – my Situationist Scrapbook, which has a sandpaper cover – think about that for a moment – sits atop a case where it mostly gathers dust since out of sight really does lead to out of mind.

 

 

 

* The critical books are in the livingroom not because we give an ascendancy to them, but because a poetry collection is visually chaotic, with all manner of chapbooks, oversized volumes & unique (if not downright strange) bindings. The critical texts tend all to be university or trade volumes and have that homogenous feel I ascribe to Barnes & Noble or Borders (tho, in fact, neither carries nearly enough critical texts). I have a plan to move the Harvard Business Reviews – about a decade’s worth – down to a rolling wire bookcase in the study. I don’t refer to them that often, but every once in awhile it’s important to track down something Michael Porter or Clayton Christiansen wrote. That will make room for the next generation of critical texts, so that the final volumes of the Benjamin Collected don’t need to be stacked atop the cases.