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.]

feature not flaw

A line that doesn’t make sense in a poem is a feature not a flaw. It shakes the reader from the rote act of reading.

chaotic reader

This means that I am more of a chaotic reader who often avoids the responsibilities of ownership in favor of library books, as if reading books that do not belong to me grants me some additional measure of freedom (libraries—the only arena where the socialist project has succeeded).
[...]
There's nothing terribly wrong with reading "only" poetry—but there's still a shadow of premature professionalization hanging over this practice. A shadow of shallowness.

—Adam Zagajewski, “Young Poets, Please Read Everything,” A Defense of Ardor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)

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.

different reading

Reading a play is another kind of reading.

chastened reader

Lately what I’ve been reading shames me enough not to write. And that’s a good thing.

brief dip

A book he could tell early on he would not read in full.

best parts

Sometimes the best things about a book are its preface or afterword, it’s footnotes or its bibliography.

not on the same page

Two poets were talking about the value of reading, how it informed their work, and probably they were reading entirely different books.

tell me what you know

I want your poem to tell me how much you know about poetry.

wide-eyed

Wide-eyed, ready for anything, I’m trying to read like a young person again.

reading to the limit

Once he believed he could read till he found the reason for all thing—read till it all fell in place.

one and many

In order to say something insightful about any one poem, you need to have read enough others.

library paradox

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

tough slog

The experience of reading a long poem is enhanced merely by one’s sense of accomplishment.

make a verse of

Helen Bevington’s When Found, Make A Verse Of (Simon and Schuster, 1961)

I found reference to this book on the site Neglected Books. Intrigued by the description, I bought a used copy (second printing) online. Helen Bevington was an associate professor of English at Duke University, teaching alongside her husband, Merle Bevington, whom she affectionately refers to as “B.” The book is a series of brief encounters with books, with authors, about the people she’d met and places visited.

After many of the vignettes she offers a poem, hence the title, …Make A Verse Of.  Her poetry is accomplished but clearly out of synch with post WW II late-modernism of her times. Her gift is light verse, wry verse, and touching sentiment never lapsing into banal sentimentality. He poetry appeared in many leading periodicals like The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly.

She is scholarly but with an easy erudition and the ability to disclose what may have been overlooked. Helen Bevington is a genial guide through the literary byways of Robert Herrick, Dr. Johnson, Thoreau, Madame de Sévigné, and many other literary figures.

A couple of samples:

The Poet as Singer

    We complain today that the poets no longer sing. They talk to themselves in the low conversational tones, expecting to be overheard. (Marchbanks says, in [G. B. Shaw’s] Candida, “That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them.”) Sir Herbert Read even urges poets not to be audible, but to keep private and remain unheard: “Never lift your voice—modern poetry has an inaudible wavelength.”

   Yet in a golden age, Pindar and Sappho sang. The Elizabethans were lyric poets in the true sense: “to be sung to the lyre.” Campion’s lyre was a real one; it was a lute. I have no idea whether he wrote the poems first and afterward set them to music, or whether he added the words to existing songs. It may have made no difference to him which came first. His words and notes, he said, were coupled “lovingly together.”

   Unlike our modern poets, Campion remembered that, if a song is to be heard, he must trust the rest of us to become singers, too:

               All the songs are mine, if you express them well,

               Otherwise they are your own, Farewell. 

[91]

=

The Wisdom of William Morris

   When I look at my own house, I think wistfully of the good sense that William Morris would teach me. He once said (in a lecture on “The Beauty of Life”),

    “…if you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

   I choose to believe that the advice rules out most gadgets. It meets Thoreau halfway in the matter of simplicity. It echoes the Greeks, whose possessions had both utility and grace. It mixes, as Horace said, the utile with the dulce.

   Where, then, is the time and skill for the acquiring of beautiful saucepans, or of stirrings spoons to stir the soul?

[139]

desert trek

An arid read: Page after page yielding few quotable lines.

bars not spines

He began to look upon the spines of the unread books as prison bars.

close but not long

For a poet, all reading is close reading—which may explain why some of them have such difficulty getting through novels.

—Peter Robinson, Spirit of the Stair: Selected Aphorisms (Shearsman Books Ltd., 2009)

stacking up

When a book gets delivered to your home before you have finished the last one ordered.