Poet, writer, and prolific translator Stephen Mitchell is learned and lucid in his translations. This volume, which has been in my library for nigh on three decades, feels to me as timeless as anything I have read, and I return to it again and again because it stresses the joy to be found through the shift in focus that comes through giving up stressful thoughts–through meditation, sudden insight, or through dawning awareness of the impermanence the imbues everything, through embracing “the dance.” I also appreciate the range of voice and culture represented by this slim volume. It seemed a good last offering with which to bring these “April Spotlights” to a close.
Stepehn Mitchell
Context for My Poem, “The Beauty of Emptiness”:
I suppose that this last poem for the month–and the 240th one for me generated in April over eight years–appropriately regards the exhale, the release, the letting go as a natural process and one to be celebrated, rather than mourned.
With many thanks for your kind attention to my posts and poems this April.
Wishing you well,
LESLIE
Norwegian Bookcase, Vesterheim Museum (Leslie Schultz, 2017)
The Seminary Co-op Bookstore, born as part of the Theological Seminary at the University of Chicago, is a rare place. Founded in 1961 as a cooperative academic bookstore, rather like a food co-op, the Bookstore became a legend. For decades, it was housed in the basement of the Theological Seminary building basement. Think unassuming door, steep staircase down. No windows. Cindar block walls and low-hanging steam pipes. Winding aisles of book stacks, deliberately structured to encourage browsing, contemplation, rumination, and discovery.
In recent decades, it has been relocated and reborn. Since 1983, its (above ground) sister store, 57th Street Books, has offered the best in more general offerings, including children’s literature and other general titles such as popular fiction, cookbooks, science fiction, mysteries, and graphic novels. Now the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, too, is above ground nearby, and thriving as a pioneer–recasting the academic bookstore as a not-for-profit entity.
As with so many valuable things in my life, knowledge of this special place–and the book born from it–was given to me through the generosity of friendship. It is thanks toBob and Julia Denne that I was able to visit this incredible bookstore some years ago, when Julia took me there on a visit. (Julia, a gifted teacher of Russian language and literature introduced me to the works of Tolstoy and Turgenev and a host of other writers. She allowed me to interview her a decade ago here.) I was able to learn more about the Bookstore from the written statement Bob made on Winona Media in 2013. A decade ago, I asked readers for suggestions of their favorite independent bookstores. Bob Denne generously wrote a section on the Seminary Co-op Bookstore. (Local readers will note that this was so long ago that Northfield then had Monkey See, Monkey Read but not our current excellent independent bookstore, Content.) And recently, Bob gave me a copy the recently published book In Praise of Good Bookstores by Jeff Deutsch, (Princeton University Press, 2022).
This book is not one to read once. It is a work of concentrated richness that illuminates the connections between all of us–readers, booksellers, librarians, writers–in a continuous and continuously unforlding community that creates a different sense of time and space. Deutsch uses the metaphors found in the works of other writers to ask us to consider the good bookstore–run by human beings rather than algorhithims–as a both a garden and a public square, a place where one finds conversation and contemplation, “fruit” (new work) and “stars” (work of enduring merit). One of the things that interested me most is the way the author describes the shift in consciousness one feels in a place dedicated to books–reminding me of the effects of the yoga studio, to being immersed in the natural world, to the shifts resulting from any kind of meditative practice. Deutsch also has well reasoned distinctions between “value” (as a commodity) and “worth” when it comes to the art of selling books, and thoughts about the worth of rereading–an enterprise I prize more and more with passing time.
As you can tell from the marked pages of my copy, there are many riches inside, not only Deutsch’s beautiful prose but the quotes he curates from ancient and contemporary authors. This thoughtful and thought-provoking treatise is a true treat for a bibliophile. I am clearer about the ways that libraries (public, academic, and personal) overlap with good bookstores but are not at all interchangeable. As readers, we need and deserve both! (Sadly, so far the SELCO public library system does not seem to have a copy in its collection, but I was able to find two copies on the shelf of our local Content Bookstore.)
To truly understand get a sense of this book, one needs to read it for one’s self. For this post, I thought I would give a sense of how the book is structured by choosing one (only one!) small excerpt from each of its seven sections. Just a little taste….
The Presence of Books: An Introduction
“The Chicago poet Nate Marshall once said, during an event at the Co-op, that ‘the greatest thing a poet or poem can give you is permission.’ A bookstore, too, is turns out, can give you permission.”
Space
“Epicurus thought the noblest were ‘most concerned with wisdom and friendship.’ It was written upon the threshold of his school, known as the garden, ‘Stranger, here you will do well to tarry. Here our greatest good is pleasure.'”
Abundance
“Therer are virtues to book ownership as there are to communal collections, though the virtues are quite different. A patron who borrows a book is beholden to a calendar that privileges quick reads–books that both read quickly and want to be read soon. How many books must ripen on our shelves before we are ready for them? And how too might we properly digest a lush, elusive, or powerful book without marking and annotating it, and without having it at hand that we might reread bits and pieces?”
Value
“‘Without an eye to the future, regardless of current figures, the resultant enterprise will not only not only be shoddy but also economically unpromising….the fortunes and energies and spirt of the firms and the people in them will be organized and oriented to a ramshackle machine driving forward at ever greater speeds.'” (excerpted from publisher Peter Mayer’s thoughts on the state of publishing in 1978.)
Community
“When empty, the bookstore is filled with community, with our collective memory–with aspiration both communal and individual–and when full, the bookstore often maintains a quiet usually obtainable only in solitude. The arguements and enthusiasms contained in the volumes on the shelves create their own communion with the individuals reader, while also providing a mechanism for discourse. It is a public square, no less articulate for most often being mute.”
Time
” Calvino observed that ‘in every text he writes, in any way he can, Borges manages to talk about the infinite, the uncountable, time, eternity or rather the eternal presence or cyclical nature of time.’ In his story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths,” Borges creates a suspense more suspenseful through his meditations on time than through his brilliant plotting of a murder.”
The Good Bookstore: An Epilogue
“Like Borges, I am a reader first, which also means I’m one of the quiet, bookish thousands who ruminate during a good browse. As much as I have written from the perspective of a career bookseller, it is as a bookstore enthusiast that I file these dispatches. I steward the Seminary Co-op because I want to live in a world with bookstores like the Seminary Co-op….These bookish landscapes built me as I built them.”
In addition to the poem composed for today, I thought of a poem I wrote last year that I wanted to share because it offers a corrollary for the mood in Deutsch’s book. It is based on a memory of a Minneapolis bookstore, since closed for good.
Not Quite Eternity
Silk umbrellas rot by the door, loose-furled.
I enter this bookshop on a rainy day,
for a time have the whole place to myself.
Even the proprietor, in the back,
who surely heard the jingle of his belled door
does not emerge, so it seems that I take
shelter in a lonely stand of old trees.
Books with faded spines mount toward the ceiling.
The ceiling is pressed tin. Silvered once. Now dull
as rain-laden clouds or murky fleeces
on a distant hill. The light wan, soft;
the air scented by almost luminous dust.
Shelves make straight rows, almost a grove,
with an undergrowth of haphazard piles,
leaning, here and there, on the wooden floor.
I reach for the word “Keats”, prise open
stiff leather to find the text of letters,
long since delivered of their joys and
spangled sorrows, yet sharp phrases still glint
when I cut these soft pages of old rag.
Leslie Schultz
Context for My Poem “On Good Bookstores”:
My poem for today draws on my recent close reading of Deutsch’s excellent book, as well as something said to me by local legendary booksellar, Barbara Bonner, at the Carleton Bookstore when I first moved to Northfield and which I think of many times each week. The quote was from Cicero: “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” For the poem, I sought out the original Latin and went from there.
Earlier this spring, I became more deeply acquainted with Victorian poet Walter Savage Landor. I had sent a copy of my first collection of poems to a friend, and when she read the first poem in Still Life with Poppies: Elegies, called “On Biography”, she wrote to say that it was worthy of Walter Savage Landor.
Wait a minute, I thought. I know that name! I knew he was Victorian, but I could not recall any of his works, so I looked him up. At the Poetry Foundation entry for Landor, I found a good sampling of his poems, and I fell in love with one that was knew to me. It is called “Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher,” just four lines long. I printed out a copy and fixed it to the refrigerator. It is now memorized—engraven on my heart.
Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher
by Walter Savage Landor
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art;
I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;
It sinks; and I am ready to depart.
Now I am mindful not only of the very active life of this accomplished poetic forebearer but also of the compliment paid to my own small poem. And what a fascinating life Savage Landor lived! After the turbulence he created and endured, his epigram might only be a wish–it seemed he strove with everyone!–but it is is so purely crafted that, even if it is sheer fiction, it rings with quiet conviction. My hope for Landor is that he did achieve this kind of acceptance of life and death by his late demise, and for myself that each day, lived to the full, would serve, should the need arise, as “a good day to die.” In the meantime, I am forecasting that this summer is “a good season to read more poems by Walter Savage Landor.”
Here is the poem of my own that sparked all this exploration:
On Biography
to those I leave behind
I would write a book that cannot burn,
a book of clear-running water,
complete, with song and wisdom—stern
as my beautiful daughter.
All biography ends in death.
All lifelines run their seaward course.
Read me again, while you have breath,
until you know my secret’s source.
Leslie Schultz
(first published in Mezzo Cammin;
republished in Still Life with Poppies: Elegies)
Context for My Poem, “Coming Attractions”:
This poem was inspired by my day in the garden yesterday, in the company of my beautiful daughter who deliver the surprise gift of a “Bluebell” grape vine (Thank you, Andrew!), and also from the quiet mood of Landor’s poem. As I remind myself frequently, “The present moment is the gift.”
Wishing you a serene day,
Until Tomorrow, LESLIE
California Poppies, Lanesboro, 2015 (Leslie Schultz)
Who doesn’t love words? The sounds, the connotations, the denotations, the multifaceted meanings and pronunciations and histories, personal and otherwise? I often recall exactly when I learned a new word, either on the page or through the medium of the ear. That sense of expansion, juxtaposition, and possibility for use is one of the most delightful aspects of a being alive, I find. I guess my friends know that about me!
This offering from Oxford University Press (2006), Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, edited by Erin McKean, arrived on my own shelf late last year as a Christmas gift (Thank you, Beth!)The cover declares this gathering of unusual words as “A whimsical lexicographical petting zoo,” and I agree: this sums up not only the substance of this summoning of rarely encountered words but its spirit as well. It is the updated edition of an earlier title by lexicographer McKean that contains more words, all arranged alphbetically with etymologies, helpful pronunciation clues, a logophile’s bibliography of Oxford Press’s dictionary offerings, and a guide to coining one’s own candidates (correctly, from Greek and Latin roots), words that don’t exist but simply should.
The very first word I chanced upon late last fall was “lacustrine.” I still haven’t used it in a poem, but one day I will. (It means “associated with lakes”–the lakey version of “riparian” or “associated with rivers”–and a useful word for a poet who lives in the Land of 10,000 Lakes (really north of 14,000 at last count.) Until I see how to deploy it effectively, I shall keep it in my pocket like a polished stone.
Context for My Poem, “Moromancy”:
Today’s poem, “Moromancy”, takes an off-kilter look at human attempts at forecasting and was inspired by an entry in Erin McKean’s reference book (above). It means either “foolish divination” or “telling the future by observing the behavior of fools.” And yes, I had to add it to the spellchecker dictionary!
This is the most recent book added to my culled library. I bought it just yesterday morning. The excitement is akin to that of a new box of 100 crayons!
Look! A Rainbow of Cut Edges!
To have a clearer look at the table of contents, please see the link below. (In addition to thoughts on individual colors, there are fascinating general remarks on optics, color perception, and helpful indices. Meanwhile, here is an Impressionistic taste of the interior.
Context for My Poem, “Polychrome”:
My Collage of a Quilt–Photographs of Fabrics to Create a Bagua
Yesterday, I took some valuable advice from a book I will spotlight before the end of the month on good bookstores. I allowed myself to not simply picked up the book I was after, but I allowed myself to browse our local independent bookstore, Content. There, at the very back of the store, on the bottom shelf, I saw the book spotlit today: The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair (Penquin Books, New York, 2016). Sat down to explore its structure and style. And, feeling very excited, brought it home.
So far, I have only read a tiny sliver of its pages but I am certain it will be a permanent resosurce. I have always felt that color is medicine. Too many cloudy days make me feel sick, and I think that full-spectrum light enhances health because it contains all possible color. Linquistically, this resource has great resonance because it showcases the names we have devised for different tints, shades, and hues. I have been enjoying the history of common-name colors and becoming acquainted with names antique or otherwise obscure to me previously. I have also been making mental note of the color names I perceive and use that are NOT here! I feel sure this will provide not only pleasure on first reading cover-to-cover but serve as a kind of color thesaurus for my work as a poet and writer. I think it will help me to be more precise, and it will probably also lead to new ideas for poems.
Case in point: Last night, I read about an ancient pigment called lead white–long-lasting and terribly toxic. I thought that might lead to a poem about poisons. Yet, this morning, I awoke thinking about the seemingly colorless, white or bleached buildings of the Mediteranean world, and how shocked I was to learn in an art history course in college that they were originally highly colored. The result is today’s poem.
