I never met a library I didn’t like. —William Stafford in “The Art of Poetry,” Paris Review, issue # 67.
Recently I was invited to read at the Seminole Community Library to the Florida Bibliophile Society. That was a fine combination. Poets (well, all writers, I suppose) love libraries; when I see a book of mine in a library, I think, “Good; you’ve found a home.” And bibliophiles — people who love and collect books — are by definition friends of ours. At the end of the reading they gave me a present that suggested they were clairvoyant as well.
The gift was a small but handsome hardcover book, A Wordsworth Anthology — an unexpected trifecta of sorts. First, not only do I love many of Wordsworth’s poems, but — as I’ve written here before — visiting his home in England’s Lake District led Jeanne and me to move into our tree-covered cottage and fill our yard with the azaleas that enrich our lives every day.
The second bonus of the anthology is its long introduction by Laurence Housman. I remembered his name immediately: He founded England’s most “radical and progressive” bookstore, Housmans Bookshop in King’s Cross, London, not far from where we lived with Eckerd students on Gower Street. I’m happy to say it’s still going strong; it recently held a reading/signing of Royal Babylon; The Case Against the Monarchy, a prose-poem by Heathcote Williams. In today’s fractious political atmosphere, America could use more bookstores like this.
Housman was the younger brother of poet A. E. Housman (1859-1936), the author of A Shropshire Lad, with its memorable lines, among others, “Oh many a peer of England brews/Livelier liquor than the Muse,/And malt does more than Milton can/To justify God’s way to man.” Although Laurence gives Wordsworth great praise, his wit is reminiscent of his younger brother’s when he criticizes the poet’s late conservatism, singling out a sonnet sequence defending capital punishment (“Sonnets Upon the Punishment of Death”) which “tends to make you dislike God and man about equally.”
But the biggest surprise of the anthology was its origin. It’s from the estate of one of my favorite poets, William Stafford (1914-1993) — Oregon’s long-term Poet Laureate and in 1970 the Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress — inscribed to him by John Gross, his roommate at the Iowa Writing Workshop. Stafford’s most famous poem is “Traveling Through the Dark,” about meeting a pregnant dead deer on a dangerous curve. But he was equally famous for his amazing work habits, getting up in the dark every morning, writing thousands of poems that resulted in 57 books!
I saw these habits the first time I met him, at a poetry festival in Abingdon, Va., where we were scheduled to read. The night we arrived, we stayed up late at the hotel bar, chatting about mutual friends and politics (he was a conscientious objector in World War II — we had lots to talk about). At 8 a.m., I staggered down to breakfast (we were on a panel at 9), and there was Bill, polishing up a poem he had already written about a meeting with the night watchman. “I have wasted my life,” I said to him, quoting a line from James Wright and shaking my aching head.
At the panel, Stafford told the students that a writer’s job was to “write day in and day out, no matter what happens.” A student asked, “Mr. Stafford, do you really write every single morning?” “I do,” Bill said. “But,” the student persisted, “what if you can’t think of anything?” Bill thought a moment, as if he were giving his answer for the first time. “Well,” he said, “I lower my standards.”
So thanks again to the Bibliophiles for their thoughtful gift full of rich and resonant memories.
Dwarves and Giants, Pinkshell, Flame—
O my dear, so many azaleas are dying!
We must have a party! Here! This afternoon!
—from “Azaleas” by Peter Meinke, in Liquid Paper: New & Selected Poems, U. of Pittsburgh Press 1991