A cool of books
will sometimes lead the mind to libraries of a hot afternoon, if books can be found
cool to the sense to lead the mind away.
For there is a wind or ghost of a wind
in all books echoing the life there, a high wind that fills the tubes of the ear until we think we hear a wind, actual
to lead the mind away.
I recently found this poem(written by the late William Carlos Williams, United States Poet Laureate & Pulitzer Prize Recipient) not in his Paterson Book III: No, I found it in the Los Angles Book of Reviews by one Jonathan Creasy who had dedicated this particular essay/review to a great New England poet Susan Howe. In this review, Creasy is focused on Susan Howes’s published Telepathy of Archives. And, if I understand it correctly, Creasy points out that Howe’s readings, among other salient points map, Elements–water, wind and fire- are kindled by a “cool of books”.
My first “cool” library was not a school library nor a town or city library from the north shore of Massachusetts, my place of birth and public schooling during the first decade of my life. I did not open the doors of those libraries. My first library came to me on wheels once a month during my summers with my aunt and uncle and grandparents on the family farm in the small rural Berkshire town of Becket. From the age of five to my early preteen years, I spent every summer with my gaggle of cousins learning the ways of the woods and fields while helping my Uncle Rob and Pa farm. I owe my introduction to the world of “books on shelves” to my Aunt Flora. She made sure we had the opportunity to explore and read the likes of the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift among others. Any books lent to us by the library had to be read and ready for return by the next month when the large “Bookmobile” would kick the dust up in our long driveway before parking in front of the farmhouse once again. I was so happy libraries made house calls. Though the milk man and the good doctor did and don’t any more, I understand around the world libraries on wheels and other means still make house calls to rural areas that patiently wait for the internet broadband, the largest library of all.
Another excerpt from Creasy’s article Telepathy highlights Howe finding that “this visionary spirit a deposit, a deposit from a future yet to come, is gathered and guarded in the domain of research libraries and special collections. Echoes of life arrive telepathically from the past to present at the instant of discovery.
Often by chance, via out-of- the way catalogues, or through previous web surfing, a particular “deep” text, or a simple object (bobbin, sampler,scrap of lace) reveals itself here at the surface of the visible, by mystic documentary telepathy. Quickly-precariously- coming as it does from an open direction- If you are lucky, you may experience a moment before.
Our human voice, our words, our communication with each other is so linear. I know this yet I am always amazed when I read a talented poet who shows me an image, a vision, a provocation of my intuitive connection that is far from linear! Susan Howe highlights this in My Emily Dickinson; “There is a mystic separation between poetic vision and ordinary living.”
The Yankee Magazine (March/April 2019 edition) has a wonderful article penned by one Glenn Stout entitled The Mother Library. Stout introduces the article with the following; “Libraries raised me,” wrote Ray Bradbury. He is not the only one. Growing up , I marked each week by the days between visits to our town library and by the stack of books I slowly devoured. That I would one day work in a library now seems like destiny, something as certain as the turning of a page. For me a transplanted Midwesterner who’d lived in Boston for less than a year, still ignorant of the ways of New Englanders in general and Bostonians in particular, the Boston Public Library proved to be both teacher and parent. It became the key that allowed me to find a home in a place I did not yet know. Within the granite walls of its two buildings that anchor Copley square mingling with its people, routing through the collections and dust of that magnificent place, I discover myself.”
My lighthouses welcome me home, libraries both personal and public are that home!
Thank you for reading.
Mark