Return to Reading

I used to think I wanted to be a librarian. It all started at the Perry Carnegie Library which had some daunting steps for a four year old in a smocked dress. A woman stood on the lean-to ladder pulling down a book. I want to work here, I told my mother, after I began to know the scope of a day in the alcoves of the library. Along with the numbered volumes, I loved the sunlight, wood, ceiling fans. It was a temple in our mundane little town.

I made it through many tests and tight places by the book. In the presence of a book, I was safe from awkwardness. If I’d had a better book on sex, that would have helped a lot. As it was, I married young and read the Russians when my babies took a nap.  I read the Beats. I read the war resisters and the early feminists. Eventually I had to get a job. To avoid the rigors of the cash register, I went back to school. I thought I would make a good librarian.

My grad school application essay spoke of search engines, venn diagrams, Boolean logic. I’d been warned: these days, for heaven’s sake, don’t expound upon your love of books; that’s démodé. Linked bibliographies, collection development by algorithm, self check out scanner, pro and con. People used to say: how fun to be a librarian with all those books. Books were deep background. Information was on the rise. 

So I became a librarian just in time to usher in a multitude of databases, a cyber age, techno savvy research, reading with an eye to cut and paste.  I made a living. I still liked the sunlight coming in the atrium and the cart of recent acquisitions. Eventually I had a nice big office.

Now I am a recovering librarian, recovering my lifetime love: novels, poems, histories and geographies good enough to read cover to cover more than once.  I have a great support group, my avidly irreverent, funny, and opinionated book club. I have wonderful book buddies. I can be completely random in my reading. And if I get too compulsive, or heavy on the you-have-to-read- this-book, my friends forgive me. I’m a recovering librarian and a reader born-again.

Good News!

The Lady Victory

Poems by Jane Vincent Taylor
is available from Full Circle Books in Oklahoma City and at Amazon.com.

The Poetry of Home

a week long workshop at Ghost Ranch
has spaces available. July 30- Aug 5, 2012. Register soon at Ghostranch.org.

Summer Rituals

I can’t decide if this summer calls for a new routine, or no routine. Where are the new poems, I ask myself. I hope they are in this unadulterated notebook I’ve just unwrapped, dating the first page, performing my secret blank-book ritual. Routines and rituals, what would we do without them?

When I was a child we routinely went to Sunday Mass, ate fish on Friday, and gave up mostly chocolate bars for Lent. We churned ice cream on 4th of July, sprinkled the clothes with water before we ironed them, fried an August egg on the hot sidewalk, and during the stickiest nights of summer slept outside on cots under a net of fireflies.

Routine. It’s French : for route -- a path, a road to travel. Both ritual and routine offer ways to get from one place to another. A map or recipe, orderly and prescribed perhaps, but pointing to an unknown door. Rites have always moved toward a threshold.

One of my favorite childhood journeys was one where we kids, all dressed up, walked from the portico of St. Joseph’s school to the church, St. Rose of Lima, at the far end of the street. It was May, post-Easter-death-and-resurrection. This, a softer feast, we just called Crown the Queen. With blasts of Spirea in our arms we walked two by two. One child loaded down with boughs, the other in charge of a paper-collared candle. The tapers were lit the moment it got dark enough to make a sparkly show. We were flame and flower moving in song toward our goal: to place a wreath of roses on the painted blessed virgin and make her come alive. Actually, it was we who came a little more alive, even if the cloying churchy atmosphere could make a few girls faint away and have to be revivedwith cardboard fans and smelly handkerchiefs.

Perhaps you, too, were raised on lovely ceremonies. Some of ours brought comfort; some were full of contradiction, irrationality, and fear. But mostly they fed our need for beauty, amazement, and a dose of transformation. Looking back it seems that for routines to become true rituals they need to jolt one off the common path, offering, if only briefly, an awakening.

Last week, for instance, to break the monotony of Tinker Toys, I took my granddaughters (aged 3 and 6) for a walk around the neighborhood. It was ordinary: curb walking, rock collecting, bird watching, dog visiting at various fences. At each corner we decided which route looked the most promising, surprise-wise. Nearing home an oddly brindled cat came bounding out in front of us. A miniature tiger/panther mix, we decided. The girls were convinced it had escaped from the zoo. For about a block we were in the wilderness, a very small wilderness, but still. A walk had turned into something extraordinary.

I think it doesn’t really take that much. Sometimes we escape routine by walking further into it and letting imagination run wild a bit. I’m hopeful for new poems because summer, queen of rituals and not- that-much-routine, is almost here.

Work

Today I’ve been thinking about work, my work, and also the tradition of work I come from. My father was a telephone man, a lineman; later he ran the switch room. These days one would say he worked in “communications,” as does my oldest son, and in fact, do I. Hey, as you read this, are we not watering the fields of communications, cyber-wise, blog-wise?

A few years ago I retired from a career in librarianship (which is very fine work, indeed) and am now a writer and teacher. I consider this my full time work though I admit to taking lots of long lunch breaks, yoga breaks, and weeks off to garden or paint the kitchen. If I had a union contract it would have to honor the time a writer needs in non-desk activity in order to find the hot wire, the live switch. But if I had a union contract now in the State of Oklahoma I’d be considered communist, a weakling, in cahoots with a leftist devil.


You see, now that my days have elasticity I sometimes find myself  reading the local paper. The current legislature is anti-labor and to make that clear is proposing changing the Oklahoma State motto from “Labor Omnia Vincit” established way back before statehood to “Oklahoma: In God We Trust”. In other words they want to dump the quote from Virgil’s poem Georgics (originally calling on more of the Roman people to take up farming) to a well-worn dollar-begging pious cliché. Shall I tell you what I think? I love Virgil. And though I don’t think we should fall for imperial propaganda and all move to the countryside, I like honoring people’s work.

My mother worked at home for years, sewing our clothes, upholstering chairs, refinishing furniture, canning (though she hated that) ironing, and doing many of the things a 1950’s wife did to very little fanfare. Later she worked as a waitress (I still love the sound of tip change in an apron pocket), and off and on as a seamstress. Once for a while she drew newspaper fashion ads for our local department store. She also trusted in God though she didn’t insist that everyone around her do so. I don't think she would have put it on a bumper sticker.


On a happier note, I also read in the news that the Oklahoma Book Award nominees have been announced. Congratulations to all you poets and writers. Your labor may not have conquered all but it has won the heart of a State that perhaps still knows the value of a seed well sown. I’m thankful for that. Keep up the good work, everyone, whatever it is.

Letter Writing at Ghost Ranch

Letters.
How they are carried and delivered is not the issue. Rather, who composed them and to whom is what drives letters through centuries and what propels them now. That and the need for intimacy/honesty, plus a natural linguistic music.

Last week in our class, The Art of Letter Writing, a wonderful mix of humor, drama, and imagination –

Mary Claire explains to her children exactly why she bought (without their advice) her new Dodge Journey.

Katie writes her daughter on the trials and triumphs of a long marriage.

Val writes to Ansel Adams asking if there is not a secret behind his famous shot, Moonrise, Hernandez.

Susan Barney Jones gives me permission to share this fine poem.



1001 West Mulberry Street


This is a letter to my childhood home.

This is a letter to Mulberry Street

to its wide paved expanse

beginning at the eastern edge of town

ending at the hogback dotted with yucca

to ghosts of Nash, Plymouth, Chrysler, Ford

parked at the curb.



This is a letter to seven trees planted on the lot

tall sprawling blue spruce, macintosh

and wealthy apples, delicate Chinese

maple, prized and protected gingko,

aggravating Kentucky coffee putting

up suckers, spicy Russian olive.

This is a letter to plants left behind.



This is a letter to the table in the kitchen

slam of screen door, splash of faucet

water, decaying picket fence and

broken gate lock, tilting clothesline pole,

empty wooden dog house, abandoned

antenna on the roof.

This is a letter to things forgotten.



This is a letter to three bedrooms

one crowded bath, sticking metal

sliding closet doors, ceramic

windowsills, casement window cranks,

to mildewed shower curtain, damp towels,

chips of soap in a cracked dish.

This is a letter to daily life.



This is a letter to washer and dryer

shelves of glass jars, canned

applesauce, homemade jelly

and pickles, plastic boxes of sliced

peaches in large white freezer

to stacks of magazines, folders of school

papers, dress-up clothes and garment

bags, nails and tools, photos and

slide carousels

to dusty basement

to past and present.

This is a letter to all a house can hold.

Thanks to Ghost Ranch, the Fall Writing Festival team, and to my wonderful class!

The Art of Letter Writing

The Art of Letter Writing

Ghost Ranch Fall Writer’s Festival

October 8 – 13, 2011

When I told a friend that I was going to offer a class at Ghost Ranch Fall Writing Festival called The Art of Letter Writing, the truth as he saw it slipped out before he had a chance to censor himself. “If that class makes it will be full of old people.”

He teaches college kids so perhaps he doesn’t realize the pleasure and vitality of the over-fifty set. (these are my people, friend!) Besides, have you noticed that young people have taken up knitting, canning, gardening, pin-hole photography and the ukulele, all antique arts now born again with a 21st century sensibility ? Letter writing may be the next new thing.

Letters stuffed into an envelope and sent at the current rate of 44 cents could make a comeback, not for expediency sake, for sure, but for art’s sake. Whoever turns up in my class, of whatever age, will be invited to think about letters and why they matter, both historically and in the current context.

Letters from prison, letters from the road, from wars, and letters of comfort to parents, to children, and love letters. We’ll read letters and write some of our own.

What role did letters play in keeping alive the marriage of Georgia O’Keefe to Alfred Stieglitz over such long separations?

The writer Leslie Marmon Silko says to the poet, James Wright, after taking up a whole letter describing the personality of her rooster in the yard: You never know what’s going to happen in a letter.

Charles M. Russell had few grammatical skills but he dashed off illustrated letters and post cards, keeping friendships alive with little more than a savvy sentence or two.

The letter is one of the most familiar forms of communication, and one of the most intimate. Letters can be exuberant, sad, bossy, philosophical, fragmented, long-winded, and funny, but they are most enduring and artful when they are revelatory and honest in personal expression.

Charles Lamb, the 19th century essayist and avid letter writer, said writing a letter is like whispering through a trumpet. Write a letter today. Let it whisper or let it trumpet. Please, let it do more than tweet.

The Work We Love

On this winter solstice I feel the amazing circularity of life. So much changes and old things circle back, seemingly new. This post was written a few weeks ago as I embarked on a short stint as “librarian in residence” at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico.


Interim Librarian -- the old fashioned kind.
Okay, this is one of those opportunities to return to basics, embracing, as the Buddhists say, beginner’s mind. Working this week at the Ghost Ranch Library I had to learn again to stand on my feet for hours “reading” the shelves, focusing on the call numbers so as to catch a displaced stray. I searched for missing volumes, organized the overdues, brought the serials log up to date. When I was tired of that, I found the archival glue and book tape and repaired all the dilapidated Star Wars series in the children’s room. After the first day when I had washed my hands fifty times I walked to the Trading Post to buy a tube of bay leaf bee balm. I had forgotten how dust and paper dry your skin out and, in New Mexico, even more so.

The Ranch was nearly free of guests, but the staff (cooks, farmers, wranglers, maintenance folks, and office workers) use the library a lot. They immediately began singing my praises simply because the place was clean and tidy once again. Anyone could come in and read the Rio Grande Sun and find all three sections of the paper in one spot. It had been a long time since I’d done such simple work and received so much appreciation. I thought this was going to be a breeze, a lovely breeze.

But on day three I got the key to the two back rooms where all the hidden work was waiting. Anyone who has ever worked in a library knows there has to be a rat’s nest where what you don’t have time to do gets stored and often falls into a variety of confusing heaps. This is where an old professional has to get her hands (and knees) really dirty; where she has to bring some order out of chaos. I was tempted to shut the door . The Ranch is going to hire a full time librarian next year. Let the newbie do it.

No. I could at least get a start on this. So I sorted all the gift books, all the books marked vaguely “problem” and threw out catalogs and advertisements long since out of date. I fired up the catalogue computer and read the manual for using Bibliofile, a software made to pull down catalogue records, as we say, and print out cards and labels.

I should tell you right now I didn’t get it all done, but every night as I walked in the dark to my lodging I was tired. I’d done a good day’s work, the kind of work I used to do a long time ago, and could still do, apparently. For being such a way-back week where I had to call upon an accumulation of former skills, I sure felt new. Renewed, I guess the word is.

I’m wishing all of you good work, paid or unpaid, but always satisfying, as we circle into a new year.