In the spring of 2008, I lived in Amy Clampitt’s former cottage in the Berkshires. Many poems in The Children were conceived in this setting. It was a strange and isolating time for me, and I still quite can’t articulate its effects. A poem, “Everywhere I Went that Spring, I was Alone” might do a better job than I can in prose.

Weeks before the residency began, my car went kaput, and I didn’t replace it, so I walked everywhere. It was pleasant walking, even during big snows, up the steep hill into the town of Lenox to buy groceries or magazines for a dime from the library.

Amy herself didn’t have the chance to spend much time in the cottage. She bought it in 1992 with a portion of her MacArthur Grant, and she died there of ovarian cancer in 1994. Her ashes are buried beneath a tree in a backyard.

Her wide-brimmed straw hat, which she wore to marry Harold Korn, her companion of twenty-five years, rests in an upstairs bedroom. Her books fill the shelves throughout the house, and boxes of personal photographs and typed poems and manuscripts reside in a small bedroom on the first floor. The name “Korn” is still painted on the mailbox. The bed in which I slept was their bed.

For a time, I was staying up all night writing, and I’d fall asleep just as the dark was lifting, to the sounds of birds. A poem in The Children, dedicated to Amy, is called “Lenox Aubade” and begins with this experience of falling asleep to birdsong.

I wish that I could have met Amy, though I’ve tried to know her through her poems and the remarkable selected letters collection, Love, Amy. There is no earthly reason why our lives should have crossed, even remotely. All I can feel is gratitude.

Bruce Smith and Nikky Finney

Last Monday we wrapped up National Poetry Month with the fourth installment of the Sarabande Reading Series at 21c. We were treated to the gypsy-jazz stylings of  Swing ‘39’s Ben Andrews and bassist Erin Lobb, before readings from 2011 National Book Award winner Nikky Finney (Head Off & Split) and 2011 National Book Award finalist Bruce Smith (Devotions). The room was packed—people even braved the rain to line up on the street outside the gallery and listen. Though that kind of dedication certainly speaks for the talent of our readers, we also can’t help but appreciate that it was a perfect way to cap off a month of celebrating poetry.

The crowd gathers to listen to Bruce Smith.

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In celebration of poetry month and those moderate successes mingling en masse, we bid you a clip of Skinner’s abstemious croon; a reading from his latest, The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets. As it’s known, books are crucial to any poets development, and this summer Jeff looks forward to rereading Four Quartets, Yeats’ Selected, and stories by Robert Walser and Murakami; followed by a raft of new books of poems he’s waited all school year to devour. Click the following link for the audio!

6.5 Reading

To introduce this exercise I’d like to extend William Carlos Williams’s famous credo about the practice of poetry “No ideas but in things” and offer this slight variation: “Ideas adhere to things.” For some writers, gathering up the stuff of a new essay is the most daunting moment of all. It’s a moment that either threatens to overwhelm with its many competing possibilities or one that hoardes its goods and offers few satisfying entry points. This exercise, “The Walk Through,” has jump-started many dull/overwhelming moments for students. It is satisfying for list-makers of all kinds – most writers are obsessive list-makers –  and, additionally, it helps one enter the past in very concrete ways.

In the world of real-estate, the “walk through” is the time at which the buyers take a last, hard look – room by room, appliance by applicance — at the house they are about to buy. In its intense focus, the “walk-through” differs from the “showing,” that first-look a prospective buyer takes at a house; one that shows only the general scheme of things, the lay out, the over-all floor plan.

“Walk-throughs” – those bounded and concentrated ways of seeing our environment — are available to us, daily. Here’s how I’ve suggested writers take off on a walk-through: Enter, by way of memory, a familiar room from childhood, from a familiar point of entry. Often memory, or the act of trying to remember, lands us in the right in the center of a place or a situation and we have to piece the scene together from a hazy, unfixed angle. Enter through the front door, for example, direct yourself through the room and look around as you proceed, controlling the scene, as if from behind a camera. Moving slowly, you’ll be able to recall actual objects in your path and you’ll rely less on overall “impressions.” As you walk through, be sure to turn your head; note various objects to the right, to the left, in front and in back; note objects on top of objects (vases on coffeetables, rings left by errant glasses on coffeetables, things at your child’s-eye level). Peer over things. Look down into things. Creep under things. Move pillows and search around in couch cushions (as you used to!). Note the colors of the carpet/wall/curtains.

You’ll be stunned, I think, at how many actual objects exist in memory to be recalled and how many can be recalled in specificity. It’s important not to censor “insignificant” objects out of your scene: each object leads to the next  and though they may seem insignificant in the larger scheme, remember that each one serves as a bridge, carrying you forth in your walk.

When you have completed a room (and it may take a few sittings to do this fully) you can go back and include associated sensory information (the feel of the dust – or the lack of dust; the quality of light through the blue curtains; how exactly that stubborn ring on the coffeetable got there). I have found this exercise to be freeing because it upends the need to “have an idea” at the outset of writing. One is more likely to bump into an idea if s/he can provide little shocks of recognition or memory, or induce a kind of reverie. Walking through, you’ll create many instances where you are startled by what you’ve discovered – sitting there all along somewhere in your memory.

You can vary this exercise in many ways. You might, for example, “walk through” all the literal closets of your past and look at/note down what you find there. Clothes from different eras,  hidden objects – all these things, grouped by closet (or room, or car, or whatever organizing principle you employ for the walk through)  will present you with a contained world for exploration  Likely you will want to linger on certain objects, the ones that have a story to tell, that have suffered neglect of some kind. See what happens. I’ve always found it exciting to know that the objects I’d lived with for so long, and forgotten about consciously, are in some very real way, still present and intact, waiting patiently to be found and recalled to mind, so that they might offer their stories.

I am hoping they find something appropriately snazzy to wear, and make sure to report back on accolades and pizza toppings.

All of this isn’t really news, though, because our interns are wonderful. We couldn’t do without them—their smarts, their enthusiasm, their excellent sense of humor (or sense to humor us when we tell jokes)—and though they might not stay on the staff roster for very long, they’re an indispensable part of everything we’re proud of having achieved.

The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories, Hans Christian Anderson

60 Stories, Donald Barthleme

Cruddy, Lynda Barry

Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Thomas Bernhard

The Complete Butcher’s Tales, Rikki Ducornet

Sanctuary, William Faulkner

Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol

The Old, Weird America, Greil Marcus

The Moviegoer, Walker Percy

Collected Poems, Stevie Smith

Honored Guest, Joy Williams

Photo via http://www.sublackwell.co.uk/

Recently, the new fad of book sculpting was brought to my attention. In this process, old books are cut up or torn apart, reshaped, recolored, and generally gutted to make fascinating new pieces. It took a moment to recover from my horror that these books were being cut up, which appears to be a common reaction amongst bibliophiles. How could they harm these poor, defenseless books for the sake of “art”? Once I stopped clutching my pearls, though, I started to reevaluate that position. Yes, some books were harmed in the making, but isn’t that a better fate than being boxed up and sent to a final resting place on a shelf in someone’s attic/garage/used bookstore, to gather dust? In some ways these books are being rescued and brought to new life.

The artists take painstaking efforts to create their pieces. I can barely draw a stick figure, so I can’t even come close to imagining the (frustrating, I’m sure) precision required. On her website, Su Blackwell admits that she even takes the time to read through the book once or twice before starting, letting its meaning soak in before moving forward. Fellow book sculptor Brian Dettmer uses surgical tools to reshape the books he chooses, dissecting them to create new meaning from old forms. I think what I was initially misunderstanding as disrespect for books is actually just a different kind of reverence.

So, while I can’t fathom attempting this myself, I think that these artists should be admired, not chastised. For what is a book’s purpose but to constantly be reworked, reinterpreted, and given new meaning by its readers? These artists clearly have a respect for what the book once was and are just giving us a new way of seeing the text.

Michael J. Lee reading at 21c this past Monday, February 27

Something in My Eye was published last week after being accepted a year ago, and it was during this limbo period that I found myself going back and forth on how I felt about my creation, trying to decide whether it was just a strung-together hodgepodge or the masterpiece friends and family believed it to be (I never did make up my mind). But now it’s out in the world, being handled by actual hands and delivered wirelessly to handheld devices, and I couldn’t be happier. People reading my work, people thinking about my work, people talking about my work—it’s been a blast imagining the world rolling over for me, letting my lines enter their minds. I’ve been celebrating, too, allowing myself two or three glasses of wine instead of my usual one, dressing up in various costumes and disguises and frequenting a few of the classier establishments down in the Quarter, just for the fun if it. And I haven’t been the only one celebrating in New Orleans this week—carnival was in full swing; the streets were crammed with people and beads; music filled the air; and nothing, not even the many murders, threatened to end the party too soon—we kept it going all the way till Fat Tuesday. Not everyone in the city was celebrating the release of my book, of course, but it wasn’t hard for me to crown myself king for a few days, and just bask.

But that’s all done now. This week, though still young, already feels like a bust. Carnival is over, my book feels like old news, and even my ankle, which I thought I had only rolled during a dance-off, might be needing some serious attention, or at least a look. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t entertaining some dark thoughts about the world right now, and my place in it. What do you do when you have nothing to look forward to anymore? But then something happens: I see a copy of Something in My Eye on my nightstand. It’s a handsome book—Sarabande did a nice job with it—and I flip through the pages and run my hands over it and sigh a little at this object of mine, this testament to the good times. And I know what I must do. I begin reading, as if it were a stranger’s book and not my own, and allow myself to laugh and be moved by its quirky characters and silly situations as if I were just discovering them for the first time. I am only through the third story now, but if things continue this way I see no reason why I won’t be back to my old hopeful self again soon, possibly even as early as tomorrow. This is the power of literature, even if it’s only one’s own. Living within one’s lines (or another’s) can restore us to our healthy selves, or at least help point us back toward the road to well-being, where we all must go, eventually, if we’re to make it as a people. I pray that this is true. Something in My Eye did it for me. Will you let it do it for you?

Sarabandistas are passionate about film and television. Recommendations are constantly being bandied about the office. (Full disclosure: there may have just been a stern discussion with one of our co-workers about her reluctance to embrace the underrated but awesome Veronica Mars.) I’m a big fan of short films and can often be found surfing the web for new videos. With websites like YouTube and Vimeo enabling aspiring artists to get their work out there without the need for a studio or distributor, some truly incredible content can be found if you’re willing to spend a little time searching. When I came across this lovely stop animation video from Type Books in Toronto, I admit that I got a little giddy that it combined my love for books with short film.

In the video, we get to see what our books might be up to when we’re not around. Part of its magic for me may come from too many viewings of Disney’s Fantasia as child, but there’s still something enchanting about seeing these books dance on their shelves and colorfully twirl their way through the store. An impressive number of volunteers spent many a sleepless night shuffling those books around to make a short film that clocks in at just under two minutes.

The film ends with “There’s nothing quite like a real book,” and while I can’t imagine making something nearly as charming using the “bookshelves” on an e-reader, I think its real pleasure is in capturing the child-like delight and wonder that books can hold for us.