Odyssey Online

…a piece in PublishingPerspectives on the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, and the physicality of Islamic Holy Books. It’s a short article, but speaks to the book as artifact and whether (whither?) this quality can possibly translate to any kind of online platform.  There has been a lot of time and effort in trying to render the online reading experience, once orange or green words in endless streams on black screens, to something more appealing to readers, more book like.  This of course raises the question of whether or not this is a fools errand…that books are tangible, physical, objects, and attempts to render them otherwise render them something other than books, and do we, as readers, want to unhand our books?

Sounds like a summer blogging project!

…in the April 24th edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education Anne Curzan presents a fun piece on the word slash and it‘s emergence [as a] a new conjunction/conjunctive adverb.  It’s a fine piece on the elasticity of the English language, and brings to mind how poetry is a recital of the changeable music of words. All poetry in some way  is music, or, is written for a tone to turn meaning into truth.  Manipulating the music in words is craft of poetry (irregardless of the form), and to finish National Poetry month a nod to one English poetry’s greatest musician–slash–craftsman, John Keats. The list below are new titles by and about Keats:

• John Keats : A New Life by Nicholas Roe
• The Keats Brothers : the Life of John and George by Denise Gigante
• Young Romantics : the Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest Generation by Daisy Hay
• Bright Star Directed by Jane Campion, Starring Abbie Cornish & Ben Whishaw
• Can Poetry Save the Earth? : a Field Guide to Nature Poems by John Felstiner
• Posthumous Keats : a Personal Biography by Stanley Plumly
• Romantic Complexity : Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth by Jack Stillinger
• John Keats Edited by Elizabeth Cook

The list title on the list is our copy of the Oxford Standard Authors edition of Keats’ poems.

Ploughshares is a hell-of-a-good literary review (one that we have both print and online versions).  Recently on the Ploughshares Blog Rebecca Makkai wrote about “Five Books I’d Rescue from the Fire.“  The essay is about books Ms. Makkai thinks irreplaceable, essential, can’t-do-withoutable (her’s is an interesting list).  This of course prompts for any reader the question “Which books would you save from the fire?” Impossible, to be sure, but what came first to mind was Shakespeare.  The poetry that is a line in Shakespeare, the poetry that is remembering Shakespeare.  A volume of Shakespeare to save from the fire is one born here in Canton…Caliban Press’ version of the Tempest, a detailed description of the test anon–

Caliban Press announces the publication of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Designed, printed, and bound by Mark McMurray.  This edition was inspired by a variety of sources including Shakespeare’s First Folio;
Bread & Puppet Theater of Glover, Vermont; John Coltrane’s Olé; the film Black Orpheus; and of course Prospero’s library.

Text

The text for this edition is taken chiefly from the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works published in 1623. Spelling has been modernized except for the eight songs within the play that retain the original spelling. Some of the First Folio type setting practices are retained such as the use, when needed, of the ampersand (&) for “and” as well as some lineation devices. Textual advisor: Thomas L. Berger, co-editor of a new variorum edition of Henry V for the Modern Language Association and editor of facsimiles of Shakespearean quartos for the Malone Society.

Type

The text has been set in 14 point Dante by compositors “B” Michael and Winifred Bixler, Skaneateles, New York. Dante was designed by Giovanni Marderstaag and first released in 1954. Marderstaag himself published an edition of The Tempest in 1924 under the Officinia Bodoni imprint.

Paper

Printed on seven handmade & mould made papers: handmade abaca & daylily by Velma Bolyard, Wake Robin Papers, Canton, New York; machine made & handmade papers by David Carruthers and Denise Lapointe, La Papeterie St-Armand, Montreal, vatman Dave Dorrance; handmade Barcham-Green “Charles I” and “Dover”; mould made Arjomari Arches text wove and Zerkall Frankfurt cream. Additional papers include Mexican amate and others.

Images

The images in this edition are from a variety of found and historical sources including relief prints, collage, pochoir, and a volvelle. There is also a linocut by wood engraver Greg Lago, Clayton, New York.

Edition

125 copies letterpress printed & bound in handmade paper covers and purple morocco spine.  Housed in a handmade paper portfolio. 32 cm., 119 pages.

Caliban Press is an enterprise run by our Curator of Special Collections & University Archivist, Mark McMurray.   A beautiful home grown book gardened right here in Canton, Shakespeare in Canton…

Bereavement–Poetry is a Library of Congress Subject Heading. Given the tragedies in Boston and in Texas, it seems like a appropriate Subject Heading for the moment.  We have four titles that correspond:

• The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing edited by Kevin Young
• Redgrove’s Wife by  Penelope Shuttle
• Expectation Days: Poems by Sandra McPherson
• In War With Time: Poems by Leila Pepper

We also have, of course, the greatest literary work on painful repose: The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton.

…in a pointed and angry essay on contemporary poetry, New Criterion Editor David Yezzi writes, “Poetry has become so docile, so domesticated, it’s like a spayed housecat lolling in a warm patch of sun.  Most poets choose to play it safe, combining a few approved modes in a variety of unexceptional ways…these poems feel t home in coffee shops and on college campuses; they circulate breezily among crowds of like-minded poems and all of them work hard to be liked.” Below is a list of very new titles, perhaps, as spring gives way to summer, spend some time putting Yezzi’s assertion to the test?

• Special Powers and Abilities : Poems by  Raymond McDaniel
• Black Crow Dress by Roxane Beth Johnson
• Letters to Borges by Stephen Kuusisto
• The Word on the Street: Rock Lyrics by Paul Muldoon
• Me and Nina: Poems by Monica A. Hand
• The Eternal Ones of the Dream: Selected Poems, 1990-2010 by James Tate
• Almost Invisible by Mark Strand
• Bright Brave Phenomena: Poems by Amanda Nadelberg
• Home Burial by Michael McGriff
• The Alphabet Not Unlike the World: Poems by Katrina Vandenberg
• In the Futurity Lounge: Asylum for Indeterminacy: Poems by Marjorie Welish
• Pity the Beautiful: Poems by Dana Gioia

Stephen Akey has published a long thoughtful piece on Baudelaire in The Millions.  A long thoughtful piece on Baudelaire seems like something exquisitely tailored for the long thoughtful moment otherwise known as National Poetry Month…

We have a complete run (between print and electronic copy) of Poetry Magazine in ODY.  Certainly, of the literary reviews in business today Poetry would be on just about everybody’s “top five” list.  Poetry also sponsors a top five web site of poems, information on poets, commentary, and poetry, through the magic of packets, nodes, and the Internet, read aloud.  This is for both contemporary and modern poets, what better month than April to venture to Poetry online…

April is National Poetry Month.  Libraries everywhere are moving in directions poetical (for at least the next 30 days) and here at Odyssey Online a renewal of blogging about poetry, and poetry in our collections. To start with we will nod over toward the open web and a piece in Rumpus by David Beispiel who argues that Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl “helped create the world we now live in, a world opposed to an intolerant America.”

Howl is a fine start to National Poetry Month, we have the definitive version, of course, complete with variants and correspondence…

The news was broken today that Chinua Achebe has died.  A Boston Globe tribute included this memorial:

‘It would be impossible to say how ‘Things Fall Apart’ influenced African writing,’’ the African scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah once observed. ‘‘It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin influenced Russians. Achebe didn’t only play the game, he invented it.’’

We have a good selection of Achebe’s works, including the following:

• Anthills of the Savannah (1987)
• Arrow of God (1964)
• Chike and the River (1966)
• The Education of a British-Protected Child : Essays (2009)
• Girls at War and Other Stories (1991)
• Home and Exile (2000)
• Hopes and Impediments : Selected Essays (1988)
• There was a Country : a Personal History of Biafra (2012)
• Things Fall Apart (1959)

…the Atlantic is reporting that the destruction of libraries and priceless documents in the ongoing upheaval in Mali is unconfirmed, and may, in fact, not be nearly as devastating as reported yesterday…