I have a few hundred books. Most of them sit packed away in boxes downstairs in a room I seldom visit. I have a nice bookshelf made from a repurposed door. That’s where the unpacked books stand mostly at attention, snug and shoulder to shoulder: poetry, books on Buddhism or relationships, a few novels and some things I thought I might get to in the nightstand moments of life. I purged a lot of books before I moved to Memphis. They’re heavy and make moving more difficult than it already is. In college, here at Penn State, I worked at an independent bookstore. I bought a lot of books when I worked there. We had sections of books the way bookstores used to have sections of books (before they became places for apparel and blank journals and readerly nick-nacks). We had sections on philosophy, history, cooking, social science, poetry, fiction, etc. One of my co-workers, an older woman with wiry and unkempt gray hair whose name might have been Susan or Dolores and who was working on a science fiction novel would say that she buys books to relieve her of the obligation of actually reading them. I did that for a number of years (bought books I wanted but might not read) and then had to admit, that I spend very little time reading and probably like the appearance of being a reader more than the practice. I’ve read a small fraction of the books I own.
Last week, or maybe it was before then, I picked a few books of poetry off the shelf that was a door and added them to my stack of books at the end of the sofa where I spend a lot of time sitting, drinking (coffee or wine), listening to music, writing, surfing the net, and sometimes reading. These were books I hadn’t read but have probably owned for fifteen or twenty years. One of the books I picked out was, The Old Life – new poems (1996) by Donald Hall. When I first sat down to read it, I knew exactly why I never read it before: it contains four poems spread out over 130 pages. The title poem is 100 pages long. That sounds awful and painful. Long poems, to me, feel dated. They feel like they’re going to be work. When I see a long poem, I get out of its way and cross to the other side of the street. I think of epics and of Whitman and things I’m too dumb to understand. I immediately assume that the language will be flowery or inaccessible. Blah blah blah blathering on about nature or love with words like “thee” in ways that I can’t quite stomach. Which says much more about me as a poor reader of formal poetry than it does about the authors or the poems.
Nevertheless, in an “eat my broccoli mood,” in a “let’s stretch some different muscles” mood, I started with the long poem first. I’m glad I did. It’s less of a long, cohesive poem and more of a series of shorter pieces. Hall’s language is entirely accessible and his images and narratives have a slice of life, home movie quality about them – which is odd because he has railed against what he called the “McPoem” — “boring prosy little anecdotes out of memory, where the poets look back on themselves, often in childhood with such affection and pity…” Closet narcissists, all of us.
This morning, reading through a few sections, I came across Aunt Liz (not my aunt Liz, but the narrator’s). Hall’s treatment is sad and comical – enough so that I chuckled and stopped and chuckled some more and decided (copyright be damned) I should share. The line breaks are accurate, but Hall’s poem indents every other line beginning with the first (something I can’t quite render in this format):
When her young sister
married, Liz was still single after years
of falling for this
handsome egotistical playboy or
that one. She made up her mind
that she would accept the next man
who proposed marriage.
Thus she acquired Uncle Emmanuel —
perpetual chatterer
of unspeakable awkwardness,
nervous giggles,
and inane mortifying unfunny jokes,
who became the yearly
visible sore on Thanksgiving’s face;
who deadened decades
of Christmas. Beautiful Aunt Liz resigned
herself to accepting
the fate she contracted for, and smiled
relentlessly, without
import, until her arteries fouled.
On her deathbed she told me —
pale, old, and darling; skeptical
about messages of pain —
“I don’t believe this heart business.”
Moments and discoveries like these – a few lines that make me laugh – remind me of why I lug these books around and that maybe I should spend a bit more time reading, exploring, and trying things I thought I might not like.