Instances of poetry

Hello everyone. I’m still here. It’s spring, and I’ve decided to come out of hibernation. Just the other day the temperature went up over 10C and I swear I felt a kind of sap surging in my veins. I’m alive! It’s warm! I feel the sun on my face!

I have decided, however, to adopt a new blogging style. Short. Sweet. To the point. No more ramblings from one topic to another. That’s a real challenge for me, because I find so many things interesting, and I want to share them all with everyone. I guess that means I’ll need to post more things, then, if I limit myself to one topic per post.

Today it’s poetry. I happened to visit Brainpickings, Maria Popov’s brilliant blog, and read a fascinating article about a woman named Nina Katchadourian, who photographs the spines of books arranged to make sentences and poems. It reminded me of Jane, a woman I met a couple of weeks ago when I was visiting my mom.

Jane is an artist; she paints miniatures, tiny 3×5-inch paintings. My mom has two of them in her breakfast room. Jane had stopped by to bring my mom some cheese grits to help her recover from a shoulder replacement surgery. I mentioned that I loved the miniature hanging just above the jade plant on the kitchen counter. It’s a picture of a sunrise over some mountains, and it has an eerie inner light, like it’s glowing from within. She told me the effect was due to the careful application of at least 15 layers of tempera paint. And then, almost levitating with excitement, she told us about her next project: She’s going to paint miniatures of the spines of books in her parents’ library.

I am a confirmed book lover. Not just the content of a book, mind you, but the whole package. There are particular titles I remember from my childhood bookshelves, titles I remember pulling down over and over again, the covers becoming soft with wear over the years. I thumbed through the entire Time Life Science Library, gobbled the Reader’s Digest Abridged Classics, read over and over again the Little House on the Prairie series, spent a whole summer with the myriad tomes of the Wonderful Land of Oz.

I know it’s the era of the e-book, but I cannot bring myself to hop on board. I would miss too much the unique physical sensation that each book imparts; its weight, the thickness of its pages, the particular way the edges are done. A hardback is a thing apart.  The joy of the flyleaf – a built in bookmark! – the way you can prop it on its side and read it curled up in bed – the stupid iPad thinks it knows what you want, and keeps trying to right itself – the solid, muffled sound it makes when you close it and put it on the table beside your bed. You can slam it shut in frustration when someone calls for you to unbury yourself. Okay, already! I’m coming! You can ease the back cover down gently when the last page has been read, then hold it for a moment in your hand as you say goodbye – it has become a friend, now. Part of who you are.

So you can understand perhaps why this idea of books and the incidental poetry they harbor in their outer wrappings appealed to me. I’m no visual artist, but I went to my own bookshelf and found a poem almost right away. Here it is. Why not visit your bookshelf and see what you can find? I’d be interested to see what you come up with…

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One thought on “Instances of poetry

  1. That’s cool and very meta – but you write poetry without gimmicks…”and I swear I felt a kind of sap surging in my veins. I’m alive! It’s warm! I feel the sun on my face!”
    You’re a poet. I just know it. PS Glad to see my Irving book being put to good use ; )

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