built on books

When I see their trucks going up & down the streets, I like to recall that Amazon started out by selling books online.

out there

Ships and books get launched, and then most are never heard from again. Not that they sink and are lost, but they are out there on a vast ocean.

among books

He awoke one morning, a book splayed over his chest, and for a time he wasn’t sure whether or not he was actually living in the back of a used bookshop, unbeknownst to the shopkeeper.

this led to that

This book led me to that book which led me to next book I read, so on and on I read this way.

[Preparing for a presentation on the topic of commonplace books next Saturday.]

finding a gift

One of the pleasures of reorganizing my books is that inevitably I find I’ve got a duplicate or two. That gives me an opportunity to give away a book as a gift to someone I think will appreciate it.

mister fix-it

After a leg broke off the old table, he fixed it with what had at hand: a stack of books under one corner stabilized it nicely.

gifting library

Don’t ask me how many books I own—ask how many I’ve read and passed on.

no library card

He would go to the library to write and to read books, but he wouldn’t check any of them out—wouldn’t take them home—where he had too many books to read in one lifetime.

way leads on to way

There are books you mean to read but never get to, and those you read and mean to reread but never do, and so it goes like Frost’s famous lines, “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back.”

from the belan deck

Naming things can feel impossible, but when it’s done well, it’s as if that thing could never be called something else.
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I'd browse anything vaguely literary, looking for phrases that stood out as titles. Found poems.
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If you don’t play around with the form, you’re not meant to be taken seriously.
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I do believe a bulleted list can be art, poetry.
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Give me artificial creativity—is there such a thing? Kenneth Goldsmith?
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Books are made out of books.
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Language is always an abbreviation.
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The proper work of the critic is praise, and that which cannot be praised should be surrounded with a tasteful, well-thought-out silence.
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When we buy a book, we think we are buying the time to read.
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Walt Whitman would sit on a bench at the South Street Seaport and watch waves of people come and go, swaying masses of humanity, individual points of light on each.

Our poets sit at the California Pizza Kitchen bar inside Terminal 1 at LAX, the crowds before them larger, more diverse than ever, teeming.
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Change the line breaks and call it a poem.
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The role of “poet” can only be filled by a human being.
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A poem is just a shape.
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The title is part of the text.

Matt Bucher, The Belan Deck (Sideshow Media Group Press, 2023)

no pets

He had no pets but many beloved books.

reading late

As a reader, late in life, it sometimes makes me sad that I hadn’t encountered a book twenty years before or, better would have been, by the age of twenty.

to build a fire

I have many poetry books. If times get tough, I can burn them for heat.

hardcover

His bastion study fortified with bookcases.

in buenos aires

First stanza of Jorge Luis Borges' "Poem about Gifts"...

   Let none think that I by tear or reproach make light
   Of this manifesting the mastery
   Of God, who with excelling irony
   Gives me at once both books and night.

[Borges blind or near so at this point, from Dreamtigers by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]

The old Biblioteca Nacional where Borges served as director from 1955 to 1973.

interior design

The saddest books are those used as décor by interior designers.

three polish aphorisms

I had so much joy in my creations that there cannot be a question of merit.
—Jozef Pilsudski (1867-1935)

Tell me what books you have at home; I’ll tell you who you are.
—Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz (1894-1980)

Beyond each corner a number of new directions lie in wait.
—Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (1909-1966)

[Beyond each line-break a number of new directions lie in wait.]

A Treasury of Polish Aphorisms (Polish Heritage Publications, 1997) compiled and translated by Jacek Galazka

library paradox

When I had fewer books I read more. Or maybe I read the books I had better.

there, there, you'll be fine

Some books need those little pats on the back that blurbs give.

unfinished environs

I looked around and saw all the partly read books stacked about.