2010: A Bibliophiliac Odyssey

Over the course of the last four days, Friday to Monday for those in the loop, I have been to the Lawrence Public Library exactly twice.  They're holding their spring book sale (the one in fall is better, I think, but this one was no slouch) and, after spending $18.50, I've come away with 30 books.  Thirty.  One may ask if I need these books.  I have no appropriate response.  Do I need them as in 'will I die without them?'  Certainly not.  Do I need them in the sense that they will fill some gaping hole in my life?  Again, no.  But, and here's the odyssey part, do I need them because they will serve as maps and legends (with apologies, R.E.M.) to the woman/poet I am on the road to becoming?  Absolutely.


I've purchased collections of poems by Rich, Boyle, Cummings, Ammons, Smith (P. not M.), essays by Codrescu, Sedaris, Berry, short stories by Welty, novels by Irving, O'Brien, Ford, Murdoch, and literary criticism by Wilde and a host of other writers/editors I don't possibly have time or need to name here.   While I may not get to them immediately, or even in a timely fashion, these texts allow me populate the landscape of my bibliophiliac frontier with exactly the sorts of people I most want to encounter: men and women for whom words are not just things they find growing in their mouths, formless teeth made of air and agenda, but instead--for them--words are the things in the mouth that nourish more than food, refresh more than drink, intoxicate more than liquor.  


One of the texts I purchased is a collection titled America is Not All Traffic Lights: Poems of the Midwest.  Edited by Alice Fleming, this book looks most like the landscape I inhabit, the physical one, not the one of the mind.  The book itself is slim, flat.  A black and white photo that shows a ranch style home with detached garage, their rooftops covered in snow, spans both sides of the book jacket.  The bottom half of the photo is just white, just snow, a few footprints here and there (it is unclear if they are animal or human), the thin line of a barb wire fence stretches above the gold lettered title, the subtitle text a light blue.  Black, white, gold, light blue--all colors of Kansas winter--where everything is stark, where sun and sky are the colors felt most often if not seen, and where snow seems unending on a prairie unmarred by buildings, industry, or time.


The final poem in the collection is here.  I do not think it is particularly good.  I dislike the Seussian end rhyme, but it says something I have tried to say about Kansas fields but haven't been able to nail it down.  


Kansas Boy, Ruth Lechlitner

This Kansas boy who never saw the sea
Walks through the young corn rippling at his knee
As sailors walk; and when the grain grows higher
Watches the dark waves leap with greener fire
Than ever oceans hold. He follows ships,
Tasting the bitter spray upon his lips,
For in his blood up stirs the salty ghost
Of one who sailed a storm-bound English coast.
Across wide fields he hears the sea winds crying,
Shouts at the crows - and dreams of white gulls flying.


And while my odyssey is, as of yet, devoid of Cyclops, sirens, or Circe, it did manage to take me to the public library on a gorgeous spring day where I found, here in landlocked Kansas, a way to see the sea.