79º ~ gorgeous sun w/o too much heat, a gentle breeze, the sound of lawn care activities on a lazy Sunday

Well, Dear Readers, there was a time I would have sworn that the age of the Big Box Bookstore would not pass, and yet, it seems to be doing just that. 

Back at the tender age of 23, I went to work for a grand independent bookstore in Colorado Springs, The Chinook Booskhop.  This was the mid-90’s when it seemed a Barnes & Noble was popping up on every street corner, and that each location was primed to knock out the competition of independent stores around the country.  Sure enough, in my first year at The Chinook, Barnes & Noble came to town.  I remember how we, the staff of the Chinook, visited the B&N one by one during the opening week, and came back to give our impressions, talking about the huge cavernous, cold space and the impersonal retailers who staffed it. 

We read all the articles about B&N in the national press and learned that as part of their business model, they staffed the store with superstars from the home office at the beginning and then hired on locals for part-time shifts in order to not have to pay insurance.  (We were smug with our insurance cards in hand.) We learned that the same business model allowed the new store to operate at a loss for the first six months to draw customers in with deep discounts and keep them coming back, even as the discounts were slowly lessened to reach a profit.  We heard about the huge discounts B&N received from publishers due to their ability to order large quantities of books, while we slugged along with paying 60% of the cover price to the publisher.  I’m not sure if all of that was really true, but it felt true at the time.  The Chinook held on until 2004, when the owners retired and decided not to sell their dear store.  I was proud when I learned that the B& N hadn’t done in “my store.”

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve now read two articles about B&N’s fall from the starry skies of profit-making.  One article discusses Barnes & Noble being up for sale, whatever that means at the corporate level.  The other is the one that sparked this post.  Thanks to a link from The Rumpus, here’s an article from the New York Times about one of B&N’s major Manhattan corner stores going the way of so many of those independents B&N gobbled up in the 90’s.  The lease is up and the rent is too high for their now-dwindling profit-margin.  There’s a twisted sense of satisfaction in my former-independent-bookstore-worker heart about all of this.  Sure, it’s sad to see another bookstore go down, but I don’t believe the loss of bookstores means the loss of reading or literature.  We’re in the midst of changing technologies, and people will continue to read, whether through an e-reader or with a hard copy of a book they purchased online, or at a local store that is now smaller, leaner, and willing to special order titles not in stock.

Speaking of which, let me champion again, my favorite online bookstore, Better World Books.  They buy used books, they sell new & used, and they send their profits out into the world to fight illiteracy.  Hope you’ll throw a little cash their way when you can.

75º ~ glorious, a sun that doesn’t raise a blinding heat, perfect long weekend weather

Still slowly making my way through the Sept/Oct issue of Poets & Writers.  This morning, I’m reading the profile of Major Jackson, written by Mary Gannon.  While the background information and the interview questions about Jackson’s poetry are interesting, especially his use of the 10-line form, the questions about Jackson’s work as the editor of Harvard Review are the ones that have me underlining and starring his words.

When asked for a summary of what he sees “going on in contemporary poetry,” Jackson says this:

“It all just strikes me as utterly and overly familiar — the mom poem, the father poem, poems about family that seem overly wrought.  The poems that I’m attracted to, at least as an editor, are those that make me swallow my cynicism, that make me go, ‘Here is a mother poem, but it’s doing something else either with the language or the form that allows me another doorway into that topic.’  … The language isn’t dead.  (Yikes!  I’ve written about family a lot…better go back and check to make sure those poems aren’t lifeless on the page.)

“Other things I see — overexperimentation.  What I call overly inventive poems that are not making a reach toward the human; they are so much more about pastiche.”  (This sentence got a double star from me.)

He explains further:
“And we’ve had now since modernism almost a hundred years of experimentation in poetry.  I’m not sure we can do much more than what we’ve already done.  So people are passing it off as inventive and experimental and it really isn’t.”

Then, he ends with this:
“But mainly, it’s the middle-of-the road poem”
Jackson goes on to challenge us all as poets to be radical and have a “vision for the human.”  Wow!

Whenever I read this kind of interview, it makes me turn immediately to my own work with a more critical eye and really ask: have I raised the stakes here?  does this go beyond the mundane?  have I made it new in a way that another reader will find that “vision for the human” in it?  I’m thankful for the reminder.

90º ~ sun breaking through clouds, no rain to report, another day of ominous skies with no rain

Academic duty calls me away from the Desk of the Kangaroo until Friday.  Until then, Dear Reader, until then, may the poetry you read be full of surprising images and meaning that dips beneath and beyond the page; may the words you write fill you with a sense of accomplishment, no matter what stage the draft.

81º ~ overcast, muggy, breezy, seems like a brewing storm, but we’re on the low chance of getting one, others will be more lucky

I’ve just been reading through the new issue of Poets & Writers and enjoyed Rachel Kadish‘s essay “Face the Fear: A Rallying Cry for Writers” so much that I wanted to post about it here.

The essay begins with a reiteration of what Virginia Woolf writes in Chapter 3 of A Room of One’s Own: “It [the world] does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them.”  In Woolf’s essay, she is pointing out that in the face of this denial of the arts by the world, women have it even harder as they are denied not just in art but in gender.  Kadish puts a 21st century spin on this.  The world still doesn’t demand that writers write; however, the new weight on our shoulders is an economic slide and a publishing industry in flux as technologies advance and recede. 

So, Kadish sets out to give us a pep talk, and let me state here that I tend to laugh a bit when I read these kind of pep talks, as many of them are written by prose writers who might be more used to receiving monetary gains from their writing.  As a poet, I expect little to no financial reward, and have thus built a life of writing around a separate career that provides my paycheck (teaching).  I do commiserate with those fiction and non-fiction writers out there who have seen a diminishing of the once mythic publisher’s advance or even the receiving of several hundred dollars from a journal.

All that being said, I found Kadish’s essay to be on point through and through and laced with enough humor to keep me going along for the ride.

When Kadish writes, “To be a writer in any culture, but perhaps especially this one, is to defend one’s way of seeing the world against those who are suspicious of complexity and prefer to leave dark corners of the human psyche unexplored…” I am reaffirmed.  While not a political poet, I do believe that writing is a political act at the heart of it, something that endangers writers around the world, and I am blessed to live in a democracy that might ignore my work but will not imprison me for.

Later Kadish again affirms something that I too believe.  In writing about which authors succeed at having a long career in letters, she sates, “The people who keep writing are the ones who keep writing.  Talent is a prerequisite, yes; but ten or fifteen years out, the ones who are still at it are the ones who didn’t stop.  There’s no magic to it, only sheer bloody-minded stubbornness.”  Stubbornness I’ve got to spare, just ask my family!  I try to teach my students the lesson of persistence, and I practice that lesson by submitting to journals over and over again, even in the face of rejection.  Now, I’m enacting that stubbornness with the second book as well. 

In response to a publishing world that feels as if its gone amuck, Kadish advocates, “Write freer.  If no one is paying anyway, shouldn’t we write what we want rather than what we think will sell?”  Here’s one of the times that I had a little poet-as-pauper pride.  Maybe I’m not a novelist b/c I can’t figure out the trends, and it does seem that the world of the novel, even with the many, many sub-genres, is all about trends.  Maybe the poetry world is too and I’m dense to that as well!

I’ll leave you to read the rest on your own if you’re interested, in your copy or at the library.  

83º ~ brilliant & clean sun, the heat and humidity creeping back up

I’m finally ready to be done with David Shields.  As I reported in my last post about this (here), I had read Shields’ essay “What We’re All Looking For” in The Normal School 3.1, but I was holding off on commenting until I’d read the follow up article, by Bob Shacochis.  Dear Readers, I started Shacochis’ essay “What Everybody in the Room Knows” two hours ago and after a trip to the library to get Shields’ book Reality Hunger again, I couldn’t even finish the essay.

Here’s the backstory:  I read an excerpt of Shields’ book in PEN America and loved it, but then found through the notes at the end that most of the words Shields presented as his own weren’t, in fact, his own.  This caused me to check the book out from my local library (go libraries!), where I discovered that Shields presented an argument for blatant plagiarism in the name of collage-texts.  I’ve been trying to process this for months, and then I stumbled across the two above mentioned essays in The Normal School.

First, my notes on Shields’ essay “What We’re All Looking For.”  In this essay, he clarifies for me that the book, Reality Hunger, is an argument for the lyric essay and against the novel.  (I hadn’t read more of the book after I read the “I’m plagiarizing on purpose” statement.)  In this argument, he claims, “I and like-minded writers and other artists want the veil of ‘let’s pretend’ out.”  My notes say, “But he pretends to author giant chunks of RH…it’s all let’s pretend.”  In his essay, Shields praises Georges Braque because in his works “you don’t have to think about literary allusions, but your experience itself.”  Shields goes on to write, “That’s what I want from the voice.  I want it to transcend artifice.”  My notes ask, “Isn’t RH entirely artifice if he’s alluding to other writers’ thoughts, ideas, and actual words without attribution?”

The next bit might have touched a personal nerve.  Shields says of lyric poetry, “When a lyric poet uses, characteristically, the first-person voice, we don’t say accusingly, ‘But did this really happen the way you say it did?'”  I beg to differ!  I get asked this question quite often, and not just by students or beginning readers of poetry.

The rest of the essay goes on to defend Shields’ collage technique without directly discussing the appropriation of other writers’ words.  My notes go on as well, at length.

Next, I turned the page to Shacochis’ essay and was heartened because it seems that Shields had sent Shacochis the manuscript not knowing how he might react.  Here would be an essay that questions as I question.  It does, and Shacochis makes very clear when he is quoting or paraphrasing another writer.  I immediately felt comfortable with Shacochis’ authority.   Shacochis engages in a give and take, a conversation with the text of Reality Hunger, and therein lies my problem, the reason why I didn’t finish his essay.  In section 3, Shacochis writes, “He [Shields] writes in section 371: ‘Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.'”  My notes read, “Really?  Did Shields write this or take it from someone else?”  I continued on, and each time I came upon a quote from Shields, especially those introduced with a “he writes” phrase, I stumbled because I was pretty sure the words weren’t Shields’ at all, that he had lifted them whole from someone else and placed them in his book, with a publisher-forced appendix that supposedly listed sources but often just contained a last name.

This led me to the library to check out Reality Hunger again so I could find out who had said the things Shacochis was quoting from Shields.  What I discovered was that the manuscript Shacochis quotes from does not match the published book.  Luckily, with a little Google finessing, I was able to figure out that the numbering of sections was off by about 30 and could quickly find that the section 371 Shacochis mentions is section 405 in the published book.  Then, through use of that appendix Shields didn’t want to include, I discovered that the quote above belongs to “Auden, paraphrased and altered by Edward Hoagland.”

I checked through the first two pages of the essay, and in fact, all of the quotes Shacochis presents as Shields’ belong to others.  This might have been fine if Shacochis had begun his article with an explanation of Shields’ technique, if he had alerted the reader of his article that it isn’t really Shields writing anything, it is Shields copying texts.  However, Shacochis doesn’t do this.  His essay is concerned with Shields’ attack on the novel as a form, not with Shields’ techniques.

I confess that I teach research techniques to college students; however, I also teach them that they each have a voice and something to say that matters.  What happens when we stop attributing quotes to their original authors?  What happens when someone who doesn’t know that Shields is quoting someone else in those quotes that Shacocis passes along?  Yes, some of my discomfort is as a writer who wants credit for the work she’s done, but some of my discomfort resides in a world that more than ever rewards lying, cheating, and stealing in the name of religion, politics, and even art.

I must seem like a stick-in-the-mud traditionalist, a librarian with her button-down Oxford shirt buttoned all the way up, a militant English instructor ruining students right and left by my insistence that attribution matters.  Some claim that what Shields is doing is avant-garde or cutting edge.  If it is, I’ll stay here in the backwater and give proper credit where credit is due.

Sean O’Hagan in The Observer
Laura Millier on Salon.com
David Shields on The Huffington Post explaining his views

Herein lies the end of my wrestlemania with David Shields’ book Reality Hunger.

66º ~ sunlight creeping over my left shoulder through the trees, a promise of 86 for a high, feeling lighter than I have in weeks as the heat abates, have thrown open the windows even though I’ll only be in the house for another half hour of so, cats in chaos with only screens between them and the urban wild kingdom beyond

Many thanks to my good friend Anne for sending me this quote from the beginning of David Foster Wallace’s essay “A Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” found in his book A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.

“When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad’s alma mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I all of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. I’m starting to see why this was so.  College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner’s sickness for home.  I’d grown up inside vectors, line and lines athwart lines, grids — and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates.  The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals are easements, as integral as schema.  Math at a hilly Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put in light.  Calculus was, quite literally, child’s play.”

Confessions:
I’ve never been a fan of DFW, but I also have never read his essays, just attempts at his fiction.  Truthfully, Sick Puppy from Girl with Curious Hair (1989) freaked out my naive, Iowa-girl mind when I was 18.  Not sure I was ever able to overcome the trauma…I recognize this is my failing and not DFW’s.

While I love what DFW says here about those vectors and lines that are imprinted on my soul and thus infuse all of my poetry, I was terrible at calculus.  In fact, I’d been excellent at math until my senior year in high school when I hit pre-calculus.  I could work the formulas and get the “right answers” for tests, but I couldn’t understand what I was doing.

I confess that finding out DFW was from the Midwest, and wrote about it like this, motivates me to read more.

Here’s a lovely image that includes DFW with a field of corn.  May he rest in a peace that apparently alluded him here on earth.  

Image from The Village Voice Blogs.