Odyssey Online

A soaking rain through a couple of late June days seems like a good moment to contemplate quiet, rain on a metal roof quiet.  In a piece on reading that very much ties into the current commentary on the benefits of reading fiction, Maura Kelly published a piece in March in the Atlantic called A Slow-Books Manifesto.  It’s about aligning reading to the “slow” or hand made movement, the idea of taking the time to do things rather than buying them. One of the points she makes in this is reading in a quiet place in a quiet way–that the digital infrastructures that surround us (that I’m writing on now) have become overly invasive and that it takes a deliberate effort to push back. Reading a book slowly, attentively, makes a quiet space, it creates offline. In Tolstoy’s Dictaphone : Technology and the Muse (edited by Sven Birkerts) Mark Slouka has a powerfully argued essay titled “In Praise of Silence and Slow TIme: Nature and the Mind in a Derivative Age” where he argues the need that Kelly’s piece on ready is the remedy for.  If there is an original experience one can engage, it’s reading a book (yes a book, not an ebook).  Alberto Manguel’s book  The Library at Night speaks to this in a eloquent and pleasantly weird way, and a new book Quiet : the Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain is a study on the value of quiet.  The value of rainy June days and books as a combination…

In the Virginia Quarterly Review Dana Gioia has written a beautifully crafted essay on narrative voice in Robert Frost’s poetry. Mr. Gioia’s argument in the essay is that Frost’s narrative poems are where his version of modernism is most clearly demonstrated, and in making this case Mr. Gioia provides in particular an excellent reading of North of Boston and New Hampshire.  It’s a wonderful study of Frost, who is a poet with whom the SLU Libraries have a very direct connection.  One of our great rare book collections is the Frank P. Piskor Collection of Robert Frost, a collection that embodies Dr. Piskor’s great admiration for Frost. Within this collection and within our circulating collection we have a number of editions of North of Boston: 1915 Holt, a 1919 Holt illustrated by James Chapin, a 1914 D. Nutt (London), 1977 Mead, and a check-outable Poems by Robert Frost : A Boy’s Will and North of Boston 1989 Penguin Canada.  We have a number of circulating Collected Poems of Robert Frost, 1939, 1942, 1995 (Library of America edition), and a 2012 collection of Frost poems–The Art of Robert Frost–edited by Tim Kendall.

Dana Gioia is a fine writer, and we have a number of his books including: Can Poetry matter?  Essays on Poetry and Culture, Daily Horoscope : Poems, Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture, Interrogations at Noon: Poems, and Pity the Beautiful: Poems.

In an earlier post this summer I used the famous Great Gatsby cover known to so many readers.  This week in The Atlantic Edward Tenner (a writer who I’ve linked to often) has a piece on this cover, and the artist, Francis Cugat.  The original is on display in the Rare Book and Special Collections department at Princeton University, and it turns out that Fitzgerald was aware of the cover, and in communication with Cugat about it.

In the article Tenner also quotes a design named Chip Kidd wondering out loud about the future of cover design…Kidd doesn’t see one in a world where readers turn to e-books.  There are certainly no shortage of digital images of book cover art out there on the ‘net (things like the Book Cover Archive),  but as working commonplace art are book covers going the way of the rotary telephone.

Writer James Wolcott is crediting with saying, “Book jacket design may become a lost art, like album cover design, without which the late 20th century iconography would have been pauperized.”  It doesn’t seem like there’s much a place for cover art online, the image shrunk to a thumbnail (size of a postage stamp?), certainly covers like the one pictured here are evocative of a type of books (old paperbacks), and the Cugat cover of the Great Gatsby is evocative of the time and place for each reader, time and place they read the book.   The cover is part of the experience of reading a book, the idea of the book, even a mass produced edition, being itself a unique item, tangible.  If books become ethereal-digital that it would follow that cover art would evaporate.  Sigh…It has to be said that disembodied text is a much more generalized experience that print text, will that pauperize reading as an experience?

…back in March writing for Time Magazine Maia Szalavitz reported that new research from the University of Leicester suggests no difference in the ability to recall something one as read on a e-book, and something one as read in a book.  Although the same study also suggested that “book readers seem to digest material more fully.” In the terminology of the study, they come to “know” what they’ve read.  Remembering what one has read is remembering what has shaped one–music comes to mind with happenstance but reading remembered is a deliberate stopping. ( Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow… ) Back in January I published this post on remembering something written:

…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.

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…