My long-ago library memories are wistful ones, especially of junior high when one of my older cousins lived with us while he was in college. Once a week or so we’d pile into his sleek black sports car and drive to one of the big branches of the Hennepin County Library. I’d spend hours encapsulated in a white egg-shaped chair with a blinding orange interior (it was the ’70s, yes?) previewing the stack of books I’d be taking home.
The last several years, I’ve been without a library one could call substantial. It’s not my library’s fault. It was a matter of location. And demand. And funding. But I missed the days when I lived in proximity to a library where the odds were better that a title search would return multiple copies of a book I was looking for than the experience I’d become accustomed to, typically ending with something like “Hmm. Nobody’s ever asked for that one before.”
When I moved into my new neighborhood this past fall, one of the first things I did was walk to the local library branch (mere blocks away) and get myself a library card. With immense delight, I put the shiny black and white card in my wallet and slid the quick-scan tag onto my key chain, envisioning the day when I would be pumping through books so fast I’d only have time to hold out the tag as I whizzed by with more books to read.
Not wanting to be too ambitious (these were busy days, immediately in Hurricane Harvey’s aftermath, and I knew I’d not have an abundance of leisure time), I used the card to check out one book. Just one. My card was probationary, anyway. I had 90 days to prove myself a good library patron before I could secure full privileges. Best not to take chances with more than one book.
Last week, I returned the book. I had renewed it three times online, skimmed a couple of chapters before finally returning it on the last possible day, unread.
I did not check out another. I’m working back up to it.
When Megan Willome publishes her Reading in the Wild pages each month, I shield my eyes. All these people, reading all these books. Were I to add my pages, I might have to just say “See Above,” referring to the previous month’s list of books in progress, yet again completing none.
It’s true that I do have several books in progress. My Goodreads account, which I just logged onto today for the first time in many months, suggests a reading challenge for me of 12 books in 2018, what its algorithm projects as a substantial stretch goal given my past performance. There was a day when a realistic goal might be three or four times that—without much stretching and no concern for a pulled reading hamstring. But these days I cannot finish one book. I cannot even make progress. I am recalibrating after a job transition that has taken me from a solitary desk in my home office for nearly a decade to a classroom full of adults where I talk all day long to the point of having a perpetual sore throat and a supply of Yogi Throat Comfort tea always at the ready. Call it an introversion upended, where by the end of the day, even conversing with a book feels like too great of a commitment.
What does a person read when they can’t read? When a whole book is out of reach and a chapter (even a few pages) feels like too much to ask?
This is what poems are good for. (Well, they are good for many things. This is one.) Most fit on one page. They keep the conversation short. Sometimes they even do all the talking. They don’t insist a person come back the next day.
In this season, while Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal and Blair Braverman’s Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube and others sit in the stack on my sofa, patiently waiting for me come back to them, I am more likely to pull Sharon Olds from the stack (even though her poems are often two pages long) and hold a line from The Prepositions, like “fourteen, the breaking of childhood, beginning of memory.” Just that line can be enough for me for one day.
When I am saddened by my inability to bear the weight of a book, a poem, even if not a soothing sort of poem, offers a kind of comfort. I might read Izumi Shikibu:
It seemed the plum trees
were already in bloom
but when I picked a branch
what fell—so much like flowers—
was snow.
Sometimes I go back to Juan Gelman and Unthinkable Tenderness, where he even gives me justification for not picking up a whole book:
this writer used to end his stories with a shot /
I don’t know why he would go to the trouble to make up a character that soon
he’d end up assassinating in precise and lovely paragraphs
perhaps in conflict with logic / but who
can speak of logic these days / not me /
This week I started reading a collection of French poems. Short, all of them: the volume is small enough to fit into the back pocket of my Levis.
I’ve seen at dusk
the sea
violet
the beckoning
points of light
—from Eau de lune (Moonwater) by Jean Joubert, tr. by Denise Levertov
This might be the one, with its beckoning points of light, that leads me back to longer reading. In the meantime, maybe you’ll see me in Megan’s Wild Reading post, adding poems instead of pages. It’s a thing that poems are good for.
Photo by Nathalie, Creative Commons via Flickr. Post by Will Willingham.
____________________
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
- Earth Song Poem Featured on The Slowdown!—Birds in Home Depot - February 7, 2023
- The Rapping in the Attic—Happy Holidays Fun Video! - December 21, 2022
- Video: Earth Song: A Nature Poems Experience—Enchanting! - December 6, 2022
Kortney Garrison says
Poems instead of pages! Yes, do add them.
Will Willingham says
If I can uncover my eyes for the next round… 😉
Laura Lynn Brown says
Isn’t it marvelous that libraries will let us renew and renew a book? More time, for free, as long as we simply ask for it.
Much has been said (and, interestingly, written) about times when we can’t write. About times when we can’t read, not so much. Thanks for reminding us that sometimes a line is enough, and for sharing some of your recent lines with us.
I peeked in that Sharon Olds book and found this one:
action is matter’s love
Maybe that library has some thin, even pocket-sized, books of poems.
Will Willingham says
They do have them. 🙂
Megan Willome says
I love this.
One of my favorite lines from “Exit, Pursued By a Bear,” concerns a character who can no longer stand to read or even watch movies: “Mum has problems with movies now. She can’t watch people get closure because it kills her. She barely even reads fiction anymore.”
Just wish this mum knew you and could find poetry, for such a time as this.
Will Willingham says
Can’t watch people get closure.
I wonder what brings a person to that place.
Megan Willome says
If you weren’t in a poetry-only place, I’d suggest you read the book. 🙂 The mum definitely has a reason.
Donna says
Just please hear my not-much-of-a-book-reader-these-days heart saying thank you…. I somehow feel let off an invisible hook, and while I devoured, slowly, each of Callie Feyen’s words in Teacher Diaries, I feel relief to read your confession of sorts….. and feel absolved from the guilt of having renewed, renewed and then returned Mary Oliver’s Upstream unfinished. I mean, they went to all the trouble to get it for me, waaaay down here in South Georgia from God (and the librarian) only knows where. Just not here. Nothing is ever here. It somehow feels worse to not finish a book that was ‘brought here’ especially for me. Sigh. But, I feel better now. Thank you. And I’ll keep a poetry book or two more handy…. I hear they’re good for that (being handy).
Will Willingham says
I figure you got what you needed from that book, even if you didn’t read it all, and that’s really what most librarians would want. 🙂
L.L. Barkat says
In college, I changed my major very late and ended up doing an English literature major in three semesters. At the time, I was also interested in possibly going to grad school, so I was reading extra for that, too, in order to prepare for the GRE’s.
I didn’t read for two whole years after that. 🙂 Simply could not.
Currently, I read mostly by listening in the car. Fiction. Nothing I really engage with like the way I engage with nonfiction reading.
Altogether, I think what you’ve written here is good news. It seems that you engage with your reading, and right now you are all engaged-out. Makes perfect sense.
Poems are like looking at pictures. You take them out of your “wallet” and peruse and smile or sigh. Yes, whereas, it does seem that reading a novel or a nonfiction work is more like inviting company over for a long time, and having to be “on” for that. 🙂
Will Willingham says
Life is good to allow us to approach things on a seasonal basis. 🙂 This can tend to make me sad, but I know that it is not a permanent condition.
I like poems in my wallet. 😉
Laura Lynn Brown says
After grad school it took me a while to be able to read for enjoyment again, to read without hyperanalyzing whatever I read.
There have been times when the only part of the Bible I was able to read was the psalms. The poetry.
Do you think when reading is daunting or nigh impossible, for whatever reasons, there’s something inviting and hospitable about the appearance of poetry? A few words on a mostly blank page. You can hang out in the white space if you need to, read a line, return to the margins. A poem is like a friend you can trust to sit with you in companionable silence.
Will Willingham says
In ways, some poems contain a whole book for me.
Sandra Heska King says
And so I buy more books than I can check out, because sometimes three renewals aren’t enough. My in-progress and to-be-read stack is very high. I was even able to make a Christmas tree out of some of them.
Now I have even more as one of Megan’s wild students in her Through the Looking Glass workshop. Her reading list reaches to the stars. Though it’s a chapter in this one and a couple in that one… who wants to stop there? And now I want to read the whole Harry Potter series (which I’ve avoided) after reading the first chapter in the first book.
Darn those rabbits. At least I’ll have a few more entries for the next pages post. And maybe I’ll just add a piece of poetry, too.
Loved this, LW.
Will Willingham says
I read the HP books when my kids were in school. When one was sick one day, we sat in bed and read all day long, each the respective volume we were on. I was a little disappointed when he felt well enough to go back to school the next day.