I gravitate, typically, to books and magazines published in the 1920s and 1930s--not because I'm beholden to modernist work, but that these books are also physically deteriorating, crumbling and flaking into dust by the acid of the paper itself. I love looking through old issues of Poetry magazine in particular, with so many poets whose names pop up that I vaguely recognize: Genevieve Taggard, Rolf Humphries, or John Gould Fletcher, and then those I never knew: Laura Lee Bird, and her formal, Dickinson-tinged poetry. Who reads this stuff any more? And I like the physical crumbling of the paper itself, though I know well that these pages have long been digitized and J-stor-ed.
At one point in my life, I wanted to start a press called "Slow Fires Publishing," to reprint individual books of poetry by the most minor authors of the period--this, a graduate school fantasy--to replicate the book design and font, but all on acid-free paper so that the book would be "saved." It seemed heroic, although I'm not sure how many libraries would want to buy these books that would rarely be checked out by your typical patron. The sales pitch? "Ah, here's a book that's been out of print for forty years! And it's a book of poetry! By an author whom three academics in the United States study!"
And yet, this slow, partial burning away of these words is an odd comfort to me now. It's a reminder about our vanity, that what we think we do today is so necessary and important, or worse, that we write so that our words may outlive us. Of course, the irony is that I do read those words on this brown, stiff paper, do let them live with me again for a little while in a moment of solitude and quiet. It seems so furtive, conditional, and indiscriminate . . .
When I have read
All she has said,
I'll fire the sorrow-builded shed.
Comments
Are you familiar with www.kessiger.net? Not focused on poetry, but the same kind of care and ... ancestor worship, I suppose, that I adore. Poetry has always been a kind of necromancy for me.