Greetings, fellow readers! For those of you coming back from spring break, welcome! I hope all your vacations were restful and fun. For those of you yet to reach your reprieve, I feel your pain; hang in there! For me, it's back to the usual round of literature and computer science: I have a paper on Coleridge's "Christabel" due this Friday, and I just finished making a game of Flappy Bird for my Java class, so if you're in need of some head-banging frustration and futility that would make Sisyphus turn green with envy, hit me up!
Thankfully, spring break was a restorative time for me: some of my friends came to visit me in Jacksonville, and I went to the bookstore three times! This brings me to the theme of today's post: poetry. I've never been anti-poetry, but until coming to college, I've never been a big fan either. Sure, I could recognize quotes from Emily Dickinson or Shakespeare's sonnets, but I never considered myself a Poetry Reader. All that changed spring of my freshman year when I took a class called Modern British Poetry. That class really opened my horizons and made me realize just how diverse poetry is as a genre. We read everything from T.S. Eliot's long, abstruse poem "The Waste Land" to Stevie Smith's sassy lyrics complete with her own line drawings. We read classic authors like Yeats and Auden, but we also studied contemporary voices like Grace Nichols and Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate of the UK. Since then, I have taken a poetry class every semester.
I didn't realize I was a Poetry Reader until this spring break, however. I went with my friends Rachel and Haley to Chamblin's Bookmine, which is a used bookstore in Jacksonville. This place is Narnia for book lovers. It's a shabby little shoebox of a building on the outside, but on the inside, it's a forest. Books shoot up to the ceiling like trees; they crouch in corners like foxes; they spring up beneath your feet like violets. You would never guess based on its unassuming interior that Chamblin's is crammed with over a million books.
I'm happy to say that quite a few of those million books now reside on my shelves in Gainesville. As soon as we got to Chamblin's, I made a beeline for the poetry section. I was looking for Szymborska's Poems New and Collected (see my previous entries for more on her), but I found infinitely more riches as well. I ended up having a bonding moment with three other students over Adrienne Rich (they recommended three of her best volumes) and Rumi. I said, "Wouldn't it be ironic if Rumi had claustrophobia?" We were cackling madly over that one!
In addition to the Szymborska and Rich, I found good translations of Sappho and Catullus (thanks to Allison, my Classicist-in-residence, for teaching me how to spot them), complete works of A.E. Houseman and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, sonnets and lyrics of Edna St. Vincent Millay, a guide to writing poetry by Mary Oliver, and for some variety, A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. I can't believe I didn't have my own copy before!
There were many more books to be had in my successive trips, and I will write about them all as I read them, but it should suffice for now to proclaim that I, for better or for worse, am a bona fide Poetry Reader!
Until next time,
Anna
Nice haul! Next time you're there, check out Tom Clark...a wonderful, strange poet---though Chamblin's stacks him with the Black Sparrow Press books, over by the Beats section (although he is no such wretch).
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