I made the mistake of starting Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety very late last night: this is a book that I think I either should have read twenty years ago, or perhaps should read twenty years from now, or maybe I’m just blaming the book for not ending -- and perhaps exacerbating -- a bout of insomnia last night, and yes, I know that it’s strange to take issue with a book for not putting you to sleep. Or maybe it’s just that there is a particular time to be in right relation to a particular book, and so much depends on being able to find that sweet spot when you can fully commune with a writer’s words.

I should have held the course with Shirley Jackson’s posthumous collection Come Along With Me. It’s been a pleasure to read others’ responses to her work, catalyzed by the recent Modern Library edition of her work, though I’ve been finding that -- as with episodes of Phineas and Ferb -- when people try to recount the plot of a particular story or novel of hers, it doesn’t actually convey very much about the work. Which is, perhaps, as good a definition of a good short story as any that I can come up with while in the grip of the grippe (having tempted the gods who are jealous of human happiness by announcing not once, but twice yesterday that I was finally getting over it), or, rather, an insight into what a useful reflection on a work can convey – something about how a piece works, rather than the basic mechanics of the thing.

Having written that, though, Jackson writing on the basic mechanics of writing short stories is some of the most wonderful writing I know: “It is most agreeable to be a writer of fiction for several reasons – one of the most important, being, of course, that you can persuade people that it is really work if you look haggard enough – but perhaps the most useful thing about being a writer of fiction is that nothing is ever wasted; all experience is good for something; you tend to see everything as a potential structure of words” (“Experience and Fiction”).

Which all brings me to my embarrassing admission, which is that….I paid retail (but at an independent bookstore, thank you, Powells.com) for Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries because this woman knows how to pay attention to structures of words with an insight and clarity that shows you why it matters, and why you should care. She so attunes you to the rhythms of language and the structures and mythologies in which words circulate that you come to realize that “Helen Vendler” is two trochees, the metrical pattern where the first beat is stressed, familiar to us from nursery rhymes (MA-ry HAD a LITtle LAMB).  Wondering if this is why so many good fictional names are trochees (Perry Mason! Morgan Fairchild!),  even though Helen Vender may be one of the few non-fictionalized names in Isabel Gillies’ Happens Every Day, which is on some level a contemporary variation on the lives-of-academics theme Stegner sounds in Crossing to Safety that I promise I will give a good go-round sometime in the next twenty years.

"september song"

Lucille Clifton's "september song" from Mercy (Rochester: BOA Editions, 2004)

1     tuesday 9/11/01

thunder and lightning and our world
is another place     no day
will ever be the same    no blood
untouched

they know this storm in otherwheres
israel   ireland  palestine
but God has blessed America
we sing

and God has blessed America
to learn that no one is exempt
the world is one   all fear

is one     all life    all death
all one

2  wednesday 9/12/01

this is not the time
i think
to note the terrorist
inside
who threw the brick
into the mosque
this is not the time
to note
the ones who cursed
Gods other name
the ones who threatened
they would fill the streets
with arab children's blood
and this is not the time
i think
to ask who is allowed to be
american American
all of us gathered under one flag
praying together safely
warmed by the single love
of the many tongued God

3     thursday 9/13/01

the firemen
ascend
like jacobs ladder
into the mouth of
history

4    friday 9/14/01

some of us know
we have never felt safe

all of us     americans
weeping

as some of us have wept
before

is it treason to remember

what have we done
to deserve such villainy

nothing we reassure ourselves
nothing

5    saturday 9/15/01

i know a man who perished for his faith.
others called him infidel, chased him down
and beat him like a dog.   after he died
the world was filled with miracles.
people forgot that he was a jew and loved him.
who can know what is intended?    who can understand
the gods?

6     sunday morning 9/16/01

               for bailey

the st. marys river flows
as if nothing has happened

i watch it with my coffee
afraid and sad as are we all

so many ones to hate and i
cursed with a long memory

cursed with a desire to understand
have never been good at hating

now this new granddaughter
born into a violent world

as if nothing has happened

and i am consumed with love
for all of it

the everydayness of bravery
of hate of fear of tragedy

of death and birth and hope
true as this river

and especially with love
bailey fredrica clifton goin

for you

7     monday sundown 9/17/01

             Rosh Hashanah

i bear witness to no thing
more human than hate

i bear witness to no thing
more human than love

apples and honey
apples and honey

what is not lost
is paradise

Marginalia, and a modest proposal

In “Marginalia,” (which is collected in Picnic, Lightning) Billy Collins writes:

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the border of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
…
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
Fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
…
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

Leaving aside, for the moment, my friend Elaine’s conviction that A Modest Proposal was intended as a serious intervention in British public policy, I’m thinking about the fact that there are certain books that I’m shy about lending out because I’m embarrassed about the marginalia. The attempts to compose poems “after” (or right next to) Lucille Clifton. The fact that the only thing that the freshman reader of the paperback copy of The Woman Warrior had to say was “so true!” The damage to one’s street cred if the person who pages through Blindness and Insight sees the suspicious lack of commentary on the entire last section of “The Rhetoric of Temporality.”

If only all of one’s marginalia testified to one’s muscular intellect, stunning creativity, or prodigious breadth of reading -- “cf. Lessing’s footnote in Laocoön on location of Helen’s mole,” say, or nullo metro compositum est.

Perhaps now is the time to let go of such anxieties because it seems to me that books want to be read, and that most are happy to entertain even the most naïve reader because sometimes she’s the one who is going to be able pick up on a register of meaning, or to draw out an insight that will animate the work anew.