I sold my car recently and, as a celebration of sorts, took the money I would have wasted on the vehicle that month and spent it on a stack of poetry books. I will never read every page of every one of these books but I look forward to wandering through complete and collected works of John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Philip Larkin, Robert Creeley, James Merrill, and several others. I expect to get more mileage out of these books then I got out of the rarely-used car.
I am not sure why I read poetry. I rarely remember lines nor do I drop poetical quotations into conversation or correspondence. My attraction to poetry begins from the notion that it is work done of passion, or of non-commercial interest. Little money is made by even the most successful poets, with the motives for publishing poetry focusing on reputation and professional standing at academic institutions.
Of my recent purchases Ezra Pound’s Poems & Translations is one of the first books I opened, and I have his Cantos on hand. Reading Pound reminds me of my aunt’s description of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. She said it was a dazzling read but to even sense what’s under the surface (and to understand the controversy which surrounded that book) one needed a graduate degree in world religions and politics. Similarly with much of Pound (the Cantos most notably but in much of his later works) I feel unworthy of the task. The Cantos‘ numerous allusions are said to cite a relatively small body of historical and literary writing but I nevertheless expect never to rise to the occasion of absorbing the background needed to get where Pound went in those 800+ pages. I have, however, found much to chew on and laugh at in Personae and other earlier works, as well as in ABC of Reading. Pound’s mind is bloated with self-righteousness and arrogant bluster, and I do indeed laugh at the man, not with him.
My copy of Pound’s Poems & Translations is published by The Library of America, as is a recently acquired volume of John Ashbery’s Collected Poems 1956-1987. I prefer rougher parchment, and while I do not dislike the binding or printing of these Library of America volumes I disagree with those who praise the series to the sky for the quality of the printed product. To me it does not suit the nature of Ashbery’s work, much of which I have known for years from their original published volumes. I think my familiarity with these works in different printed contexts contributes to my feelings about seeing then in a uniform format that is used for numerous other writers in the Library of America series. I do not think Ashbery’s work communicates the same way when moved from one physical setting to another, with the long poem Litany in particular losing its physical mystique (or perhaps assuming a different one) by being split in two and having its halves separated into pages which are roughly half the size of the original publication. You do see the poem in the almost the same way as the original, but I find that the page break in the middle cuts the bond between the two halves of the conversation. On the other hand I might come to appreciate this format for that very separation of conversations, a division of content which is at the core of the poem’s meaning.
Nevertheless I just ordered two volumes of Gertrude Stein’s writings, as published by Library of America.
One of the great treasures of printed poetry, though, is the relationship one develops with the printed matter. As I think about this I ask myself: what printed volumes do I like? I can think of several off-hand. The piano works of Charles Alkan, in particular the Le Festin D’ésope published by Gérard Billaudot, was a particular favorite. The music font they used had a militaristic tautness about it that, to me, reflected and even became synonymous with the character of Alkan’s music. The physical size of the score was a bit larger than most others, a fact which sometimes made secure placement of the score on the music stand a dicey affair.
Another volume I learned to love was the Library of World Poetry, edited by William Cullen Bryant. I read from that nearly-800-page volume throughout my high school and college years. I grew to appreciate how it rendered jagged the lines of poetry, crushing them into narrow columns in a way that made the the restrictions of the printed page itself a part of the experience.
Alas, in both of these cases my relationship with the books was cut when I lost them. The Alkan score vanished some time after college, and the poetry book disappeared around the same time. I have since replaced them with other copies, but neither truly replaces those original books I knew so well. The Alkan score I now have in a re-print, but that re-print is on smaller pages and feels crushed onto the page. I found a copy of the Library of World Poetry at a used bookstore in Tampa, but the coffee stains in that book are not mine and the pages are not yellowed the same as the book I lost.