Odyssey Online

This is the concluding post for the blog Odyssey Online…not that I’m going to stop blogging, that will, however happen at the blog for the Friends of the Owen D Young and Launders Library.  Visit with us there, and also the SLU Libraries web site where we plan on having a much more active announcements section…

In honor of national poetry month (and because it is a peaceful slowly unwinding Monday morning) I typed Poems Work into our SLU Libraries Encore search, and, my goodness, did I get back an interesting list of books.  So interesting I did indeed feel motivated to blog out what poems work.  Here is a baker’s dozen from this serendipitous phrase:

• Visiting Walt: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Walt Whitman edited by Sheila Coghill and Thom Tammaro
• Work Life: New Poems by Paul Kane
• Visiting Frost: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Robert Frost  edited by Sheila Coghill and Thom Tammaro
• Domestic Work: Poems by Natasha Trethewey, selected and introduced by Rita Dove
• What Work Is: Poems by Philip Levine
• Visiting Emily: Poems Inspired by the Life & Work of Emily Dickinson edited by Sheila Coghill & Thom Tammaro
• Field work: Poems by Seamus Heaney
• Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks
• Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After: A Poetic Career Transformed by George Monteiro
• Changing is Not Vanishing: A Collection of early American Indian Poetry to 1930 edited by Robert Dale Parker
• Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern American Poetry by John Marsh
• The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling edited by Howard J. Booth

Writing in The Guardian Nicholas Lezard writes glowingly of John Drury’s new biography of George Herbert, Music at Midnight, the Life and Poetry of George Herbert. This is a book I’m sure we’ll have in the collection soon, and it is a nice opportunity to pause over George Herbert, who is, for many readers, a life-long reading excursion:

• The English Poems of George Herbert edited by C. A. Patrides
• George Herbert selected by W. H. Auden
• Select Hymns Taken out of Mr. Herbert’s Temple, 1697 edited by William E. Stephenson
• The Works of George Herbert edited with a commentary by F.E. Hutchinson

Some of the more recent book length critical commentaries on Herbert in ODY include Heart-work : George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic by Cristina Malcolmson, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery by  Helen Vendler, and The Pulse of Praise: Form as a Second Self in the Poetry of George Herbert by Julia Carolyn Guernsey.

Full disclosure, Jim Harrison is one of this bloggers favorite authors.  Along with his many novels, he is the author of a number of poetry volumes, his voice and narrative touch very much “front and center” in his poems.  Among the titles we have here in ODY are:

• Songs of Unreason
• In Search of Small Gods
• Saving Daylight 
• Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, Jim Harrison & Ted Kooser

All of these are published by the wonderful Copper Canyon press (they’re very attractive books) and the volume with Ted Kooser is an exchange in haiku. That book is a great example of haiku as an enduring (flourishing) form of American poetry…

This years recipient of the Poetry Society of America‘s Frost Medal is Gerald Stern.  We have a number of volumes by Mr. Stern, including:

• In Beauty Bright 
• Save the Last Dance: Poems
• Odd Mercy: Poems 
• Lovesick: Poems
• American Sonnets: Poems

We also have one book length critical study on Gerald Stern, Making the Light Come: The Poetry of Gerald Stern by Jane Somerville.

An annual April “National Poetry Month” post…a baker’s dozen of new collections of poems at the SLU Libraries:

• The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 selected by Glyn Maxwell
• Lines of Defense: Poems by Stephen Dunn
• Love and the Turning Seasons: India’s Poetry of Spiritual & Erotic Longing edited by Andrew Schelling
• Special Powers and Abilities: Poems by Raymond McDaniel
• Black Crow Dress by Roxane Beth Johnson
• It Becomes You: Poems by Dobby Gibson
• Incarnadine: Poems by Mary Szybist
• The Cool School: Writing from America’s Hip Underground edited by Glenn O’Brien
• Celtic light: Poems 1885-2010 by Lee Perron
• Countee Cullen: Collected Poems edited by Major Jackson
• The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers (New Poems) by Alice Walker
• Collected Poems, May Swenson edited by Langdon Hammer
• The Word on the Street: Rock Lyrics by Paul Muldoon

May of these are found in the Browsing Collection on the shelves near our Paul and Anne Piskor Special Collections Reading Room…

April is National Poetry Month…reading the April 2014 edition of Poetry Magazine I learned that Maxine Kumin had died in February at her home in Warner New Hampshire.  So while not a glad note to sound early in National Poetry Month, it is one that nonetheless gives us pause to celebrate her wonderful poetry and prose, a brief overview of books by and about her:

• The Roots of Things: Essays
• Where I Live: New & Selected Poems, 1990-2010
• Still to Mow: Poems
• Jack and Other New Poems
• To Make A Prairie: Essays on Poets, Poetry, and Country Living
• Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry
• The Light Within the Light: Portraits of Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, Maxine Kumin, and Stanley Kunitz by Jeanne Braham
• Telling the Barn Swallow: Poets on the Poetry of Maxine Kumin edited by Emily Grosholz

Baseball season begins, a new season and all the new hope that goes with a new season. Of course, as pleasant as idling a summer afternoon away with a baseball game on the lawn or t.v., is reading about baseball! (…in the shade from a tree or cool corner of a porch…) Several summers ago blogging here we cataloged part of the collection of baseball books, which has grown since (not only was 2013 a good year for the Red Sox it was a good year for ODY buying baseball books). These new titles are given here as a “starting line-up”:

• The Stars are Back: the St. Louis Cardinals, the Boston Red Sox, and Player Unrest in 1946 by Jerome M. Mileur
• Nikkei Baseball : Japanese American Players from Immigration and Internment to the Major Leagues by Samuel O. Regalado
• Mr. Wrigley’s ball club : Chicago & the Cubs During the Jazz Age by Roberts Ehrgott
• Long Shot by Mike Piazza
• Becoming Big League: Seattle, the Pilots, and Stadium Politics by William H. Mullins
• Smoky Joe Wood: the Biography of a Baseball Legend by Gerald C. Wood
• A Chance to Win: Boyhood, Baseball, and the Struggle for Redemption in the Inner City by Jonathan Schuppe
• American Pastimes: the Very Best of Red Smith edited and with an introduction by Daniel Okrent
• Stories & Other Writings by Ring Lardner

The last title is a Library of America edition edited by Ian Frazier–Lardner is the author of the short story “You Know Me Al,” and one of the great baseball writers of the early twentieth century.  If you don’t know Ring Lardner’s work there is an imperative read for at least one summer inning.

Our friends at the Pew Research Internet Life Project, in their ongoing attempt to create a mosaic of what the Internet is and who specifically is Internet-borne, have released a new study on who is using libraries in the United States, From Distant Admirers to Library Lovers–and Beyond. The study identifies and connects the who and why of people who frequent libraries–and comes up with some quite amusing categories for those who do (and do not) come through the front door.  Foremost amongst library users:

Information Omnivores are more likely to seek and use information than other groups, are more likely to have and use technology; at the same time, they are strong users of public libraries, and think libraries have a vital role in their communities. However, they are not quite as active in their library use as Library Lovers, or nearly as likely to say the loss of the local library would have a major impact on them and their family.

One of the “surprise findings” of the study is that only a small portion of library users report suffering from “information overload,” and that many folks (such as the information omnivores) move back and forth between digital and print information sources “seamlessly” (to invoke that ugly word).  Print and digital sources do not seem to preclude one another–this a point made by JCR Licklider back in the 1960’s when he was thinking about something that works very much like the Internet now (see “Man-Computer Symbiosis“), and is beautifully explicated by Eric Ormsby in his essay “The Battle of the Book” which was published in New Criterion back in 2001 (and, for members of the SLU Community, easily accessible through a quick search in Academic Search Complete).  Ormbsy’s essay is a marvelous contemplation of readers and libraries, and as I mentioned the way in which the print and digital happily coexist, facilitate different work.  Facilitate the work of poems, and with National Poetry Month at hand, work that needs to be done…

Reading has been in the news in the new  year.  Given the winter that has leviathan like levitated over much of the country, it has been a good winter to read–to stay indoors with a book in hand an a large warm ironstone mug of tea at the ready.  About a month ago the Pew Research Internet Project published a report on reading enthusiastically titled E-Reading Rises as Device Ownership Jumps (the good folks at the Pew Research Internet Project have been chronicling all the doings the young and old have with all things digital for quite some time), and while they are indeed much preoccupied with E-Reading they include a glimpse of the sum total of the American reading public (click the table to enlarge):

The narrative that accompanies tabulated is here, while E-Reading is expanding, there is a fairly healthy numbers in the Print category…turning reading into a matter of quantitative dissection is, well, worth a retort something like Groucho Marx’s “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read” (which happily returns us to our reading inside in cold weather metaphor). The inspired madness of Marx’s quip speaking to the essential aspect of reading, that we can no more do without our dogs than our books, why do you ask?  This gets to the question of the reader’s lifetime, recently Amazon.com published it’s list of 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime and while Amazon.com is no public library, it’s a good list.  It’s a list that was constructed with a life in mind, with remembering reading as Sven Birkerts did in his book Reading Life: Books for the Ages “I miss those days, the excitement of wandering, that sense of the book as an entity that could hold just about anything between its covers.” Remember that kind of reading?  Look at the list from Amazon and the last book on the grid lower right, Where the Wild Things Are…