Poetics and Ruminations

How I Got Into Books

On occasion I’ve been asked how I came to be involved in bookselling, but I have actually been involved with books on various levels all of my life. My parents were a Baptist minister and a Methodist missionary. Though we had no money during the Depression, when I was born, our home was full of books of all sorts. My mother read to me from the cradle, and I soon learned to read for myself. Nor was writing a mysterious act, because every week for as long as I can remember I watched my father hunched over his typewriter hunting out and pecking at his weekly sermons.

Exaltation: A Memoir Review

Although I have never met Kathrine Varnes in person, our professional relationship goes back a long way, to a time before I had any notion that she existed. Let me quote her at some length from a source I found on the Internet:

“A crucial moment in my writing life came when Robyn Bell gave me the first edition, then out-of-print, of Lewis Turco's slim, red [The] Book of Forms, [A Handbook of Poetics, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968]. So I was surprised recently when someone described my poetry as "first and foremost" concerned with women's issues. That some of what matters to me comes through is wonderful, but I felt immediately boxed in by the statement, as if my turf had been roped off with a little sign: No Varnes Beyond This Line. Sure, I identify myself as a feminist, but I've no large-scale plan to justify the ways of woman to man. It brought me up short to think that writing about my mother's death, for instance, was so charged, culturally speaking, that it must be interpreted exclusively as a women's issue instead of a concern with elegy. Why not both?

“Writing is for me about remembering things forgotten, understanding things confusing, asserting for just a split second a little order or pleasure. A good poem needs to feel right on the tongue, to make reasonable sense on the surface, and also to reward any reader generous enough to return to the poem a second or third time — the usual. Desiring those qualities in poetry and actually managing them are, of course, not the same. Maybe that's partially what draws me to experimenting with meters and forms — the repetition itself promises a kind of pleasure recognized by Freud and even both Dylans. When Bishop closes "The Fish" with that rainbow now famously repeated three times, it's dazzling, ecstatic, fundamental. Oh, and so corny. A person could do a lot worse than hope to pull off something like that.”

In the spring of 1994 I attended the Associated Writing Programs convention in Tempe, Arizona, where I met Annie Finch, who was moderator of a panel on formal women’s poetry, "A Formal Feeling Comes: Formalism in Contemporary Women's Poetry," and the editor of an anthology with the same title. She asked me if I would be willing to edit a section on the sestina for a handbook-in-progress that she was co-editing with Kathrine Varnes. Two years later (on my birthday the year of my retirement from teaching) I received a letter from Kathrine who wrote to remind me that I had promised Annie that I'd edit a section titled “Sestina: The End Game” for their reader, An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), which I did, and was happy to do. I wrote this poem for Annie and Kathrine when I received my copy:

Imus Is in Mourning

The jockey of shockiness Imus
Said, “I’m a good fellow, not Janus.
So forgive me you nappy-
Headed ho’s. Pappy’s
A redneck who’s sorry though famous.”

Alternate last line:

Sad he’s a blithering anus.”

The Elections Last Fall

A Play in One Act

Cast: She, a wife
He, a husband
Darwin, a butler
Nicholas De Ville, a politician

As the curtain rises, He and She are seen at a glass-topped tea table in the midst of a lovely garden. Evidently, they have been eating or ⎯ rather ⎯ snacking, for He is settled back in his chair with his legs spread out and He looks very warm. He is puffy, red of face, middle-aged, dressed in flesh-pink tights and a white dinner jacket.

She looks cool in comparison. She, too, is dressed in pink tights. About her neck is a string of pearls. She is younger than He, blonde and rather elegant.

Upon the table there is fruit, a plate of olives, and a tea service. The sunlight is very bright.

She. Have another olive, dear. A ripe one this time. You’ve eaten all of the green ones, (petulantly) and I like the pimentos so much, too.

He. Oh, for heaven’s sake. Don’t act as though I’d eaten you out of household and pantry. Order another plateful for yourself. I don’t want any more. I’m stuffed.

She. Where did the butler go? (She rings a silver bell.) He’s never around when you want him. (She rings again and waits, frowning. Again She rings. An ape appears, swinging in on a vine, and lands beside the table. He is dressed in a white dickey and tails.) Finally! More olives, please. (The ape takes the empty plate and swings out.)