Notes from a Godine Intern: Jessica O'Neill

{Editor's note: the internship program at Godine has a more than three-decade–old tradition of fine young people — students or recent graduates, mostly — working with us for three to four months and learning the trade of publishing through real experience; they proofread, edit, opine, write copy, work sales projects, and even occasionally design, along with the myriad daily office duties we require to run efficiently; they're as important to us as a full staff member.}

After interning at Godine for nearly three months, the most valuable acquisition I have made was not that of a book manuscript or a cover image, but the office’s water cooler — or as it’s called in New England, the “bubbler.” {ed: Jess is from New Jersey} This isn’t to say that I have been given dull or meaningless projects; to the contrary: the projects I work on are usually interesting and always meaningful to the company (or at least that’s what they tell me) {ed: it's true}.

I simply want to point out what a rather epic change in the day-to-day life here of Hamilton Place this cooler has been. Previous to its arrival, everyone brought drinking water. It could be considered typical for people to provide their own bottled water in an office setting, if they are being so picky as to require their water in bottles. However, drinking the tap water here is not recommended — in fact, it’s impossible. It’s brown, to be exact.

Within a week of beginning work here, I received repeated warnings to take care not to drink the water, not even for rinsing dishes. I would not have heeded these warnings, as I’m not typically frightened by drinking tap water, but the brown tinge of the water definitely called the consequences of consuming this water into question. Unfortunately, the old charming brick building where our office is located comes with equally old charming plumbing.

For the first few weeks here, life was tough. I lugged an enormous water bottle to the office every day, praying that I would not need more than a liter. Occasionally, someone would venture down to the 7 – 11 on the corner to buy a gallon for coffee, but most of my earlier days here suffered from drought, draft, and decaffeination.

Since the addition of cool, clean water to our office, however, the mood at Godine has certainly brightened: no more parched throats, or cracked, dry voices are heard talking miserably on the phone; no more frigid, coffeeless, winter mornings; no more frost-bitten fingers longing for a warm mug to hold. And that’s not all: our water cooler comes equipped with an extra special hot water nozzle that provides boiling hot water instantly. This hot water nozzle continuously incites excited discussion from David Godine about the ease of making Hot Chocolate, though we have not yet seen any conspicuous empty packets around. Today, while refilling my relatively light-weight 20 oz bottle of water at the cooler, David remarked, “Don’t you love it? Isn’t it just great?” Every time David hears the “bubbler” working its magic, he cannot resist the urge to comment on it.

Thus, despite the ever-varying tasks I have completed since working here (most of which do not include getting lost among a tower of dull paperwork or running out for coffee, as other publishing internships’ might), taking responsibility for bringing water, that staple of human existence, to the staff at Godine, has been my most rewarding endeavor.

Andrew Motion on Retiring from the Laureate Post

At The Guardian: an editorial from Andrew Motion on his eminent retirement from the post of British Poet Laureate. He writes, "As I say, in this respect nothing much seems to have changed in the past 10 years. But even as I repeat that, it feels not quite right. Why? Because even if the press doesn't always reflect it, the mood within the poetry-writing and reading community itself feels different these days. It's difficult to be precise about this change, but my sense is that we have learned to live with the variety of poetry being written in the country more happily than we used to do. The old sense of "them" and "us", establishment and avant-garde, London and regions, has matured into a curiosity that is willing to cross old boundaries. The health and diversity of creative writing programmes has helped to make this happen; so has the rise of non-metropolitan and internet poetry publishers; so has the work of interested parties such as the Arts Council and the Poetry Society. But it doesn't mean we can now settle back and congratulate ourselves on reaching the end of a difficult road. Once upon a time the challenge was to learn tolerance. Now it's to develop more appropriate sorts of critical language and expectation for particular kinds of work. We want to live in a culture where everything is welcome, but not in one where anything goes."

Trumpeting the Trumpet ~ Native Honeysuckle

This past weekend I set up shop at the annual Mass Audubon Birders Meeting. I was there to listen to the day-long programs and to sell Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities with other nature- and bird-related books offered by Godine. I can hardly give a good reporting of any of the programs presented as I felt it irresponsible to leave my table unattended and was only able to poke my head into the lecture hall sporadically. Fortunately, for me, my table was placed next to Peter Alden’s and Jennifer Forman-Orth’s shared table. Jennifer is a biologist who works for the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture and travels around the state to educate people about how to recognize the dreaded Asian Longhorned Beetle (Anoplophora glabripennis) and its devastating effects. Peter Alden is the author of fifteen books on North American and African wildlife, including the Audubon Field Guide to New England (with Brian Cassie), Field Guide to Invasive Plants of New England, and Audubon Field Guide to Florida, which he co-wrote with Rick Cech (Cech is the author of Butterflies of the East Coast, which regular readers know is a book I highly recommend). We own a well-worn copy of Alden’s Field Guide to New England — a book that belongs in the home of every New England family.

I made the acquaintance of Katrina Kruse who was at the meeting representing Houghton Mifflin. We were talking about garden design and difficult areas in the landscape when she asked for a suggestion of what to plant over a tumbled-down stonewall that is located in part shade and receives some sun. Hummingbirds were on my mind, as later that afternoon I was planning to clean and to set out the hummingbird feeders, and immediately thought of our native honeysuckle. My very favorite variety, and a favorite of the Ruby-throated Hummingbirds, is Lonicera sempervirens x brownii "Dropmore Scarlet". "Dropmore Scarlet" is not accurately described by its name. The petals are not at all scarlet colored, but a singing shade of carmine on the exterior and golden yellow-orange on the inside. Carmine is that gorgeous color halfway between rose red and vermilion. Situated throughout our garden are several mature plants of ‘Dropmore Scarlet’ and during the growing season our mama hummingbird makes her daily rounds — morning, midday and at dusk — nectaring from the blossoms of honeysuckle, bougainvillea, and annual cardinal climber. I am so enamored of Lonicera sempervirens that we tucked in several other cultivars. It is not fair to compare the hummingbird-attracting potency of these newly planted varieties to our more mature "Dropmore Scarlet" just yet as they are only a foot high. I can, however, attest to the late-blooming trait and the hummingbird attractiveness of "Major Wheeler." There is a specimen growing around back of the nursery at the New England Wild Flower Society that is several stories tall. In the brief moment that I was there purchasing several honeysuckles for a design client, I noticed their stunning "Major Wheeler" was still flowering, and three hummingbirds were spotted.

Lonicera sempervirens, also called coral and trumpet honeysuckle, is a twining or trailing woody vine that is deciduous in New England, hardy in zones four through ten, and is very drought tolerant. Trumpet honeysuckle is not at all fussy about soil. Plant it in full sun to partial shade. If trumpet honeysuckle becomes large and ungainly, prune hard to the ground — it grows very quickly and a vigorous pruning will only encourage more flowers.

"Major Wheeler" purportedly flowers the earliest of the trumpet honeysuckles, and in a deeper red hue than that of the carmine of "Dropmore Scarlet". "John Clayton" is a cheery, cadmium yellow, a naturally occurring variant of Lonicera sempervirens, and was originally discovered growing wild in Virginia. The blossoms of "Mandarin" are a lovely shade of Spanish orange. I am not prepared to recommend "Mandarin" as the foliage looked ratty all summer. Foliage often looks poor initially after transplanting, so we will give it one more year in the garden.

Early blooms are an important feature for a vine planted to lure hummingbirds. You want to provide red to orange tubular-shaped flowers and have your hummingbird feeders hung and ready for the first of the northward-migrating scouts. If nothing is available, they will pass by your garden and none will take residence. Hummingbirds can easily distinguish red contrasting against green. We go so far as to plant vivid Red Riding Hood tulips beneath the hummingbird feeders, which hang from the bows of the flowering fruit trees. Although hummingbirds do not nectar from tulips, the color red draws them into the garden and the flowering fruit trees and sugar water provide sustenance for travel-weary migrants.

Lonicera sempervirens has myriad uses in the landscape. Cultivate to create vertical layers, in a small garden especially. Plant trumpet honeysuckle to cover an arbor, alongside a porch pillar or to weave through trelliage. Allow it clamber over an eyesore or down an embankment. Plant at least one near the primary paths of the garden so that you can enjoy the hummingbirds that will be drawn to its nectar-rich blossoms. I practically bumped into one last season as she was making her rounds. Did you know they make a funny squeaky sound? I began to take notice of their presence in our garden when at my office desk one afternoon in late summer, with windows open wide, I heard very faint, mouse-like squeaks. I glanced up from my work, fully expecting to see a mouse, and was instead delighted to discover a female Ruby-throat outside my office window, nectaring at the Cardinal Climber. Trumpet honeysuckle not only provides nectar for the hummingbirds, it also offers succulent berries and shelter for a host of birds.

End Note: The above mentioned cultivars of Lonicera sempervirens are available from the nursery at Garden in the Woods, which is the home of NEWFS, Corliss Brothers, Wolf Hill, and Weston Nurseries. Please check availability.

Andrew Motion Reads Poems from 'The Mower'

from Godine's forthcoming The Mower, by Andrew Motion

New Events Calendar

We have just revised our events page on the Godine website with a gorgeous embedded Google Calendar — you can add events with just a click or two to your own calendar, our add our complete calendar of events for automatic event updates. Buzz around the office is that the new calendar is "snazzy." Hope you enjoy it, plenty of events will be added soon!

The Guardian on Lark Rise to Candleford

or "Why Lark Rise to Candleford Will Always Be Great"

Over at The Guardian, Richard Mabey writes extensively on "The Enduring Appeal of Lark Rise to Candleford." He writes of author Flora Thompson, "Her sense of dislocation, of drifting away from her roots to become an onlooker, helped give her the perspective to create what is perhaps the most intimate and persuasive account of the old rural order just before its transformation by modernism. . ." and that "Lark Rise to Candleford is remarkable for its celebratory realism. It neither romanticises [sic] poverty nor underplays it. Thompson gazes back at the goings-on in her home country with the same loving attention that White paid to his house crickets and swallows, noticing everything but judging nothing. No detail is insignificant."

Poets House New York

Beginning April 4th, Poets House, a 50,000-volume poetry archive and literary center in New York City, will open its 2009 Showcase Exhibit at the historic Jefferson Market Library. Two Godine titles — Metropolitan Tang by Linda Bamber, and the upcoming The Mower: New and Selected Poems by Andrew Motion — have been chosen for inclusion in the Showcase. If you're in New York, swing by and check them out!

Reading Wanda Coleman's "Mediocre Madonna"

A Tale of Two Tigers

Recalled to Life

As seed and plant catalogues pile ever higher in my ever-shrinking office, I am culling all for sources of delicious vegetables and herbs, native plants, fragrant cultivars, and plants that will expand the Lepidoptera and songbird habitat. With inviting descriptions accompanied by enticing photographs, it is difficult to exercise restraint. Absorbed in thoughts of new life in spring, I am reminded of an incident that occurred at about this same time last year.

My husband and I had returned home from a venture along the backshore to witness the waves cresting in the aftermath of a late-winter storm. With great gusts blowing up from the south, the storm was tropical in temperature, but not in degree of ferocity. Drenched to bare skin, we came in through the cellar to remove our soaked clothing, where, to our dismay, we encountered a newly emerged tiger swallowtail butterfly, unable to fly, with its wings dragging along the cold stone cellar floor. I carefully picked it up, holding the butterfly along the sturdy leading wing margin, and brought it into the warm kitchen. Its wings had not fully unfurled and the butterfly was in distress. We provided a twig for it to crawl upon, which would have allowed its wings to hang down, and then, perhaps, fully expand. That was unsuccessful and the butterfly preferred instead to simply rest in my hands. We offered it a Q-tip soaked in sugar water and I cupped my hands and held it there for a long time, hoping the warmth would recall it to life.

Within the brief moment of time a butterfly emerges, if just one of the steps in the complicated dance goes awry, the creature will likely fail. The crimpled, wet wings are tightly compacted within the chrysalis. The butterfly pushes head first through the pupa case and upon emerging, with its crochet hook-like feet (tarsi) grasps at nearby surfaces. Hanging upside down, body fluids are drained from the swollen abdomen and pumped through tubular wing veins (called struts) to the very outer margins of the wings. The butterfly’s double drinking straw (proboscis) must zip together, or it will be unable to nectar. For several hours after eclosing, it remains hanging upside down in a stationary state, the most vulnerable of positions, to allow its wet wings to dry thoroughly. The mystery of how the tiger swallowtail came to be in our basement, and why it eclosed in early March, prompted me to learn more about this magnificent species of butterfly.

The Golden Thread

Tiger swallowtails are recognized by their four rows of tiger-like yellow and black stripes and thin black tails extending from each lower wing. Canadian Tiger swallowtails are common throughout northern New England and eastern New York. Eastern Tiger Swallowtails are more common in southern New England and New York. We are fortunate in Massachusetts to be located where much overlapping of both species occurs. Canadian and Eastern Tiger swallowtails are closely related and were not recognized as separate species until 1991. The clearest way to see the difference is to compare wingspan. The Canadian is smaller, with a wingspan of just under 3 inches; the wingspan of the average Eastern is 4.5 to almost 5 inches—the southern female ranks as the largest butterfly of the East Coast. Canadian Tiger Swallowtails are generally a paler yellow and the darker border next to the body is thicker. When the wings are folded, the yellow sub-marginal band on the fore wings is largely continuous, not interrupted by black wing veins. Tiger swallowtails are highly palatable and, as a defense against predators, have evolved with rapid wing movements and erratic flight patterns, which make these differences between the two species difficult to discern without side-by-side specimens or photos.

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Lepidoptera
Family: Papilionidae
Genus: Papilio
Species: glaucus ~ Eastern Tiger Swallowtail
Species: canadensis ~ Canadian Tiger Swallowtail

The purpose of identifying the different species is relevant when planting to encourage tiger swallowtails caterpillars to colonize your garden. Host trees for Canadian Tiger Swallowtail caterpillars include native species of birch (Betula), black cherry (Prunus), and aspen (Populus). The Eastern Tiger Swallowtail caterpillars have adapted to a wider range of host trees from multiple families, especially wild cherries (Prunus sp., Prunus virginiana), tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipfera), ash (Fraxinus), and sweetbay magnolia (Magnolia virginiana) in the Deep South. Both species are generalist when nectaring. I most often observe tiger swallowtails nectaring at plants with clusters and panicles of small florets, native buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis), butterfly bush (Buddleia davidii), and Verbena bonariensis, for example.

Adding to the challenge to accurately identify whether Canadian or Eastern, female Eastern Tiger Swallowtails may exhibit sexual dichromatism, a dark-phase that mimics the highly unpalatable and toxic blue/black coloration of the Pipevine Swallowtail. The yellow form of the females is more typically seen in our region and is similar to the males, except that the hindwings above the black margin are covered in beautiful blue iridescent scales. Iridescence in wing scales is an example of how Lepidoptera have evolved with structural color that is disorienting to predators. The flashes of light created by the iridescent scales, combined with undulating wing beats caught in sunlight, causes hungry birds to be confused. The characteristic “tails” that lend swallowtails their common name are significant aerodynamically. Airflow is directed over the wings, enabling extended glides at higher angles, whereas Lepidoptera with more broadly cut wings would normally stall.

We look for tiger swallowtails eggs on the topside of host tree leaves. The spherical, green, pinhead-sized singular eggs are not easy to see amongst the surrounding foliage. The first instars are dark brown with white markings, which resemble bird droppings (another defense against birds). Later stages become luminous light green, with yellow and black thoracic “eyespots” that mimic the eyes of small snakes. Tiger swallowtail caterpillars have yet another defense against predators. When threatened, they will evert their osmeterium (a unique horn-like appendage that resembles a snake’s forked tongue), which emits a smelly secretion.

Most tiger swallowtail caterpillars feed at night, spending the day in a rolled-up leaf mat bound with spun silk. When ready to pupate, the caterpillar turns chocolate-brown and spins a silk girdle, a “thread of life” that supports it in an upright position as it begins to pupate. The chrysalis resembles a twig, or knob of wood jutting from the trunk, and the thread holding it in place is as fine as a strand of golden thread. In the case of the chrysalis formed in late summer, the pupa enters a state of diapause and the adult emerges in spring. The same thread of life girdling chrysalis to branch will keep the pupa secure through winter snow, sleet, and ice, and during violent spring thunderstorms and nor’easters.

The Track of the Storm

Artfully mimicking the twiggy growth and withered leaves of the lantana (Lantana camara) standards we winter-over, it became clear how a tiger swallowtail chrysalis could find its way into our cellar. Prior to bringing plants indoors, I now thoroughly examine all for signs of Lepidoptera pupa. The unsolved mystery is why. The eerie atmosphere created by the tropical storm in winter, coupled with the unsettling early emergence of the butterfly is haunting still. Perhaps the electric energy and unusual balmy temperature carried by the storm caused the butterfly to eclose several months too early. Whatever the reason, I return to the not unpleasant task at hand—catalogues beckoning with plants to enhance the songbird and Lepidoptera landscape—anon to be engaged in the garden of possibilities.




"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way . . ." — A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

David Godine at Publishers Weekly

A selection from David's most recent interview, this time with Publisher's Weekly:

Asked about the timing for both the Le Clézio and Thompson, Godine responds, “Luck,” and warns this writer not to make him sound too smart. “We bought Lark Rise to Candleford [by arrangement with Penguin Books, London] a year ago and had no idea it was going to be a miniseries,” he says. “There's no ulterior motive or external knowledge. I love these books. I had them in an old Oxford University Press edition. We've bought a lot of great British books lately: Gerald Durrell's Fillets of Plaice and Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie.” Quoting English novelist and critic Frank Swinnerton, he adds, “We publish what we love and do our crying in private.”

Notes from a Godine Intern: Rachael Ringenberg

{Editor's note: the internship program at Godine has a more than three-decade–old tradition of fine young people — students or recent graduates, mostly — working with us for three to four months and learning the trade of publishing through real experience; they proofread, edit, opine, write copy, work sales projects, and even occasionally design, along with the myriad daily office duties we require to run efficiently; they're as important to us as a full staff member.}

I am one of the two current interns proudly continuing the institution of interns at Godine. These seasonal internships are unpaid and thus, as I have no livelihood interests at stake, I will let you in on a few of the secret happenings of a small press — just the ones that industry hounds are always after. Like the reticent Wonka and his chocolate factory, it is sometimes difficult to guess at what covert operations are hatched behind the imposing gates of David R. Godine, Publisher. (And it’s true, if you come to Boston and stand outside the door of the Godine office, you will first encounter a fierce ironwork gate.)

Aside from the completely overwhelming intensity to do things right and well, which takes one several days to understand, several weeks to adjust to as a pace, and probably months to indoctrinate; the secret I will to tell you today is that within the offices of Godine there are three typewriters. They are not kept as archaic relics of a bygone era for the occasional fond nod and soft pat of recollection. These friendly creatures are actual humming, clamorous, and fully functioning machines. Though David’s office is at the other end of our office flat, the steady rat-tat-tat that reliably follows his daily entrances to the office does waft its way down to our space, and is relied upon throughout the day as a sure sign that he has not left the building. Correspondence of all kinds launch furiously from David’s desk (one of the few consistent tasks that interns do is taking out the mail), which leaves me curious as to how the Post Office manages to be running a deficit with men like David loyally working for the cause.

If I were to encounter you in a jungle, and you were to confess that you’ve never held in your hands something typewritten on a modern typewriter, I would attempt to describe it to you as this: neatly inky. Having been at Godine for two months, I have already logged several hours at the typewriter. My personal opinion of them began with suspicion as I warily ticked through my initial assignments, followed by slight disdain when I realized how my mistakes were unforgivingly recorded, and currently you find me at cautious alliance. Alliance because there are a variety of tasks which fall to this workhorse, and so I too now rely on its steady orbiting ball. A post-it* scrawl elevated to a neatly preserved notation, a stack of envelopes set slightly apart from your average company mailing, a postcard able to be filled margin to margin with news.


* Another secret. Post-it notes, salvation to some offices, are rarely seen around Godine. Their ephemeral nature is viewed as unreliable and therefore, is dismissed.

New Feature: Preview

I'm very excited to announce a brand new feature of the Godine website: Google Preview! Using our partnership with Google BookSearch, you'll now be able to take a peek inside of most of our titles right on the book's webpage. It took me quite a while to master this technology. Or, at least, tame it to our needs.

For example, if you wanted to browse the first few pages of The Prospector, all you have to do is click on the prominent Google Preview button immediately below the cover image; a window should open up with the preview pages where you can see the table of contents and read from any chapter you like. (The cover on Google is our older, now defunct edition.) We've often said, especially about our illustrated and children's books, that once people have our books in hand they fall in love with them. This is as close as we've ever come to being able to have our customers page through the books at our website. So, I hope you'll use it often and enjoy.

Nota bene: all of this excitement is coming soon to Black Sparrow Books. I swear.

David R. Godine at Conversational Reading

David was recently interviewed by Scott Esposito at his excellent blog Conversational Reading, regarding the art of publishing in a recession. Here's a brief excerpt, but do go over and read the whole interview:

"SE: What in particular are you planning to do in 2009 to react to economic changes? What's your outlook for this year?

DRG: We are being very careful in what we decide to actually publish and what we decide to reprint. Not just the titles but also the quantities. It is not going to be a very ambitious list, but there are enough titles on both the Spring and fall list with a fairly sure potential to sell well that I would say I am cautiously optimistic. Which is, of course, the only philosophically tenable position for a publisher to maintain in any market."

You can also find an older interview there with me, regarding the effect of the Nobel Prize on a small press.

Shades of Would: Writing and the Question of Black Identity

Over the years, I have been approached by fair-skinned, straight-haired individuals who I suspected were Black by “the vibes” they gave off. This usually occurred after a poetry reading. As the crowd thinned, one person would hang back until no one else was within earshot. Then, following the painful confession that “I don’t look like it, but I’m Black too,” I would be asked for advice on how to handle the emotional difficulties and the psychological damages that came with entrenched acculturation and / or their refusals to pass for Asian, Jewish, Latin or White. I felt somewhat an authority, given that authorities on the topic were scarce (still are), and given that my children were the products of a mixed marriage — and that the ever-troublesome topic had made its way into my writings. I preferred to allow the poet in me to speak, to offer succinct and constructive answers and time-tested solutions to specific problems.

My particular identity crises, however, were of a much more subtle nature, related to regional differences which compounded the issue of race. I was not a Southerner, nor was I close to any family roots in what was coming to be known as “the Old South,” nor was I from Texas (A nation unto itself: a maternal uncle once declared he had never experienced racism until he joined the military during the Korean War and was stationed in Texas for boot camp.). My immediate family origins were largely from the Plains States, farming and rural, but my upbringing had been strictly urban and rather generic. Being born in what I have termed “the Deep West,” my parents — “an Oakie and an Arkie,” as I often either lovingly or facetiously called them — reared me to speak only “the King’s English.”

Reading the complete works of Shakespeare by the age of ten, along with the King James Bible, and virtually every other text in my parents’ teensy library, including the sequestered Henry Miller, I had long entered the hostile world of public school and libraries, had undergone the ritual of being called “Nigger” and “Black” (then, an expletive), and was well on the path toward learning the caustically cruel lessons that came with being intellectually and psychologically different from one’s peers. At home, I was forbidden the use of foul language, blasphemy, “bone-head English,” or the slang I brought in from school. To say “ain’t” or “goddamn” instantly generated corporal punishment. I once, actually, had my mouth washed out with Ivory soap (the same soap mother used to give enemas). The usual punishments were sharp cracks of backhands across my face, or a whipping followed by the additional denial of TV privileges and having to go to bed at seven o’clock instead of nine — assuming I could lay down comfortably on my throbbing behind.

“Spare the rod and spoil the child,” my father would intone, with a Moses-like basso that shook my bones.

My parents were not only beautiful, but possessed an overwhelming physical power so traumatizing that I could not utter a profanity without stuttering, stammering and having spasms of the torso accompanied by a stomach ache. Thus, I never said them. It would take an empty auditorium, stubborn determination, and the encouragement of a friend to break the spell my parents had cast. Once broken, at age 14, it was gone forever. But it wasn’t long thereafter that I would discover the more sophisticated and subtle difficulties connected to place and self-image. Along with obedience, my parents had also drummed into me the notion that I was equal to anyone who was White, that I could be proud of my race, and that as long as I did my best I would be rewarded. The latter delusion would be dispelled by the time I left home, the day after my 18th birthday. But the former teaching has remained intact. Ironically, it became a character trait that, coupled with my creative bent, unfortunately separated me from many of my “scaredy” colored peers — those who feared the White world and its inhabitants, and / or deeply believed in the inferiority of African peoples who were once enslaved.

This was an especially painful happenstance during the onset of puberty. This self-hatred festered in the psyches of many of my Negro classmates to the extent that it often became an insurmountable barrier to friendships. It often caused destructive behavior, toward the school building, the buses, students, and teachers alike. Bizarre incidents occurred daily, and I believed I was trapped in insanity. But pleas to my mother to transfer me out of the schools I attended were met with her stony insistence that I learn how to cope with the circumstances. It would take years to do so, and exposure to the world outside, before I would come to understand what was soon to be called “ghetto mentality.” This acquired understanding has informed my work as a poet and writer, and I am as fascinated with it now as I was in childhood.

As for coping, I was lucky to survive my internment in the Los Angeles Unified School District. I was helped by several sensitive individuals who went out of their ways to protect me. They were perceptive adults, some creative, all ambitious, who also saw themselves as trapped in the system, if in entirely different ways. They spanned the racial, religious, and gender spectrums, and saw through my mediocre test scores and grades to the creative entity beneath. These teachers and mentors not only complemented the rich cultural environment my parents provided (when at their best), but they sheltered me from the relentless racism that prevailed between 1950, when I entered the school system, and 1964, when I graduated from high school at seventeen.

With their help, I was able to combat the ignorance and violence that defined my life in the public schools of the southwest. These mentors gave me the chance to distance myself from what I termed “the madness.” They fostered my growth and the development of the emotional and psychological tools I needed to survive in post-war, pre-civil rights America. They enabled me to understand my other Black peers and to appreciate the history that had shaped them, and to navigate the distances between us. They enabled me to adapt. Instead of resenting those differences, I came to respect and embrace them, which lessened the impact that might have otherwise crippled me, or caused me to become a teen suicide. I had learned that all-important ability inherent in my African-American heritage — the skill of reversing the negative — to transform the madness into works of art, if not beauty; to allow the damages of racism to move through me and be transformed.

Kim Smith: Looking to the Future

Looking to the Future

Walking along a wooded lane last weekend, I couldn’t help but notice the lack of songbirds. One singular, startled robin, that was all, poking around a hedge of scraggly privet. The time of day was late afternoon, which is the same time of day our yard is typically host to a chorus of songsters. Eerily disquieted, I closed my eyes and imagined what this same lane would look like if found growing there were winterberry and summersweet, blueberry and chokecherry, juniper and holly, and the chattering collection of songbirds these fruit-bearing plantings would surely attract. Perhaps there was a disappointing lack of songbirds because invasive species such as privet has engulfed both sides of the road, or perhaps because the road abutted a golf course, which is regularly doused with insecticides intended to kill every living insect, the songbird’s primary source of food.

A friend forwarded an article, posted from the Guardian U.K., about the charismatic head gardener Alain Baraton, of the Palace of Versailles. Appointed in 1976, Mr. Baraton has made it his mission to transform the 2,000-acre traditional landscape into a model of sustainable gardening. Climate change has affected Versailles in ways Baraton never imagined. Because the chestnut trees are flowering twice a year, they are losing their glorious autumnal hues. Pine trees that have lined the park's avenues since the reign of Louis XIV are dying in gross numbers. The previous year saw so little rainfall that the lawns did not have to be mowed. It is imperative, Baraton says, to move with the times. "The gardener always has to look to the future," he explains. "We are witnessing an enormous change in climate.”

Baraton saw in the changing environment an opportunity to reform the long-standing use of pesticides. Realizing the futility of applying chemicals to rid the garden of bugs, which would only return and in greater numbers with warmer temperatures, insecticides were the first to go and he declared a blanket ban. No matter how tiny, Baraton believes every living creature deserves a place in his garden. Enticed by the prospect of plump, juicy insects to feast on, the birds returned to Versailles in prodigious numbers.

Trees and shrubs have benefited tremendously under Baraton’s guiding hand. Long gone is the tradition of planting the same species in neat ordered avenues. The gardeners vary the plantings to prevent major loss in case any one species becomes diseased.

If the most formal of public gardens, scrutinized under the demanding microscope of an international audience, can afford to forgo the use of insecticides, can there possibly be any justification for the use of insecticides and herbicides in the individual, business, and public suburban and urban landscape?

Our Dragon Lady hollies have grown tall and the winterberry is flourishing, and because of that, for the past several years we have been graced with a flock of robins in early February (Round Robin Red-Breast). The first winter the robins arrived I noticed that, after they had devoured every morsel of red berry — the winterberry, holly, and crabapple — they moved to a neighboring privet hedge. My first thought was, well at least that’s one good thing about privet. No, the robins did not care too much for it and the flock soon departed our neighborhood. Privet is tedious, and if one has the misfortune to inherit an established hedge, very challenging to remove. On the other hand, a natural arrangement generally requires a modicum of once-yearly maintenance, a light hand with the pruning sheers, to shape or remove dead wood. Imagine if all the suburban privet hedges were replaced with welcoming avenues of flowering and fruiting shrubs.

Excerpt from a Lecture by Carl Chiarenza

This passage is an excerpt from a 2008 lecture by Carl Chiarenza, "Fifty Years of Thinking about and Making Pictures"

Representation, as I use the word, does not mean a documentary trace of the natural, social world; does not refer to specific times and places. Representation in my usage refers to how photographic syntax allows and restricts — how it delimits and frames the visual transformation of whatever is silenced and stilled, and seen, from the frozen single vantage point of the camera's lens. I'm interested in how, when what is in front of my lens comes together into a new object (the photographic print containing tones, shapes and edges) — how the photograph, as a new object, causes a genuinely real but fresh experience, one which did not exist before the photograph's appearance. The word "representation", for me, is, then, about the reality of photography's way of transforming things — as opposed to the idea of photography's way of reproducing, or tracing, the supposed reality of things.

A photograph presents the artist and the viewer with a challenge, because we always want to know what it is — as if the photograph was not there. For over 165 years, an extraordinary number of forces have made us instinctively believe that photographs are windows on reality — even when reason tells us otherwise. We share photos of our children and we say, "this is my daughter," as if the photograph was not there. Consequently, we tend to fail to consciously recognize that while a photograph is substantially different from other kinds of pictures, it is still a picture, and, therefore is characteristically, and importantly, different from whatever was in front of the lens. Instead of trying to hide photography's own special characteristics of transformation in an illusion of some material reality, I try to expose them, to exploit them, to underline the fact that the viewer is seeing an abstraction, a picture, not actual events, as in this picture from 1975. (Of course, individual picture makers and picture users have their own special ways of transformation as well; and today's digital tools just compound the possibilities.)

Even without considering the digital revolution, however, the difference between photography and reality is, and always was, central to my thinking and working. In the case of the media photograph, as in this widely published image issued by the Bolivian government as evidence of the capture and death of Che Guevera, the 1960s revolutionary, this difference can have serious consequences for our understanding of political and social events. How can we know the true relationship between this photograph and the actual facts about Che? Directly connected to this question, of course, is the ongoing debate over the facts and images of events in the Middle East. The issue of difference in the case of my work, while similar, has an additional wrinkle: how to hold the viewer's attention beyond the initial frustration of being unable to decipher "what it is"; — the problem is how to get the viewer to abandon the commonly held belief in the photograph as window; how to get the viewer to go through the window to a new and unique visual event, not to an illusion of one that already occurred.

Valentine's Day

Though it may be all candies and diamonds these days, we at Godine & Black Sparrow plan on celebrating this Valentine's Day the old-fashioned way, with a good book and some Girl Scout cookies. In that spirit, here are my top five Godine and Black Sparrow V-Day titles:

The Prettiest Love Letters in the World — our modern-day greeting cards are a sad substitute for the candle-lit calligraphic love letters of the past, and this sixteen-year correspondence between the infamous Lucrezia Borgia and typographer Cardinal Bembo prove exactly how thrilling a forbidden Renaissance love affair could be.

Lancelot and the Lord of the Distant Isles — in every romantic there is the seed of a dream of the middle ages; of knights, kings, and magical intrusion, of romance in the purest sense. But those who think they know that old story of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot are sure to be pleasantly surprised by this little-known version of the myth, translated, edited, and adapted by Patricia Terry & Samuel N. Rosenberg.

Jamie is My Heart's Desire — odd would be putting it mildly; this is a love-affair for the blindly impassioned and strong of stomach. We would be amiss to believe that love is just in the virtuous, blushing maiden saved by her horse-ensconced hero: Alfred Chester provides this surrealist novel of cold-blooded love between the undertaker Harry and his perhaps-delusion, the deceased Jamie.

Bear — in this final novel by Mirian Engel, the renowned author stretches both social norms and the imagination with her intimate fable of love between a timid librarian and a kept bear. Margaret Atwood wrote, "Bear is a strange and wonderful book, plausible as kitchens, but shapely as a folktale, and with the same disturbing resonance."

Adultery and Other Choices — we know. It's so often a broken heart with whiskey in place of love and marriage, and we dialecticians can not help but feel sympathy to those suffering on the dark side of love. Andre Dubus, with all his trademark compassion, portrays in this novella "a stunning vision of loss, domination, and redemption."

Kim Smith on "New England Grows"

I recently spent several days exploring New England Grows, the trade show event supported by area educational institutions and landscape industry professionals. The Garden Writers Association's annual meeting and luncheon for the region was held there; it was a great way to make new acquaintances and reconnect with old friends. The booths sponsored by the Arnold Arboretum's Landscape Institute and NELDHA provided a wealth of information and, whenever I happened by, were packed and generating much interest in their programs. My butterfly garden photos from Willowdale Estate were part of the "before and after" slide show, one of the many landscape designs presented by NELDHA members. Several people inquired as to how to grow such great batches of morning glories: moon vine and morning glories benefit from twice-weekly doses of Neptune’s Harvest fish emulsion. (Willowdale Estate is a special events venue; watering with fish emulsion was done at least twenty-four hours prior to any event.)

I stopped at the New England Grows bookshop to sign copies of my new book, Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities! Unfortunately, Oh Garden! was situated at the table labeled "Business Books," sandwiched between Small Business Grants and Discipline of Market Leaders. Highly doubtful that any sold. One of the other writers from Garden Writers Association said she had seen my book there, but passed it by because she thought it “was just another marketing book.” When a display problem such as this is completely out of my control, I really don’t know how to fix it, but I would be interested to hear from readers who may have encountered similar problems of this nature.

The GWA event was well attended and the guest speaker, JP Faiella of Image Unlimited Communications, led an informal talk on improving business communication skills. I especially enjoyed meeting Thomas Mickey, professor of communications at Bridgewater State and garden writer for the Patriot Ledger. His book-in-progress sounds fascinating — The Seduction of the English Garden: The Nineteenth Century Seed Merchants Sold More than Plants — and is based on his year-long work at the Smithsonian, where he researched the public relations materials of the nineteenth century seed industry.

I only had a brief moment to meet and speak with Hilda Morrill; her website bostongardens.com is brimming with articles and informative listings of upcoming New England gardening events. Debra Strick, the former communications director from New England Wild Flower Society was seated at our table. She has recently launched Damera Communications, a green marketing and public relations firm. Best wishes to Debra! I hope you have as much success for yourself as you helped to create for NEWFS.

Jennifer Masiello, a representative from Droll Yankees bird feeders was also present at our table. I love Droll Yankees bird feeders for their streamlined designs and because they last for years and years. Jennifer is a treasure trove of backyard bird feeding tips. I had been looking for an alternative way to clean bird feeders, typically scrubbing with a ten percent solution of bleach. We are trying to avoid chlorine bleach as much as possible. Droll Yankees is now recommending a fifty / fifty white vinegar to water solution to sanitize bird feeders. Their recently launched line of tubular feeders, designed with a simple-to-remove base, allows a clean, fresh fill every time, which will also help to prevent the growth of mold and toxins.

Photo credits: 1. Morning glory embowered doorway at Willowdale; 2. Pine Siskins

On Independent Bookstores and blogs

If you are an independent bookseller reading this post, let me say that I don't think there is any greater proponent of the independent store than David R. Godine. He treats them all — every store, every buyer, every quirk and oddity — like a big extended family. If you've received one of his many thank you cards or other hand-written notes, or if you have been nicknamed in some way, then you probably understand. If you're in New England and he's never visited you personally — he handles our sales for this area — do call the office, and we'll set up an appointment: he's usually more than happy to stop by, show you our books, and chat about the book world. Independents have always been the cornerstone of this company, and I think many small publishers feel, as we certainly do, that as you go, we go too.

At this year's ABA Winter Institute, Patrick from Vroman's Bookstore reports, 'Bob Miller [of HarperStudio] was adamant that booksellers needed to be leveraging their roles as tastemakers through blogging, vlogging, podcasting, and using social media. Entrekin [of Grove / Atlantic] seconded that notion, with the statement that "Every bookseller needs to have a blog."' Patrick later writes, 'the digital world is built on relationships, just like the non-digital world. If you want people to take an interest in you, it helps to take in interest in them. This can be hard for people used to thinking of media as a one-way broadcast. Twitter, blogs, and the like must be about dialog if they are to be successful. And that takes time.'

I completely agree, and believe David would say the same thing. The internet is not an oddity or something that businesses can choose to ignore anymore, it's as important as customer service and stocking the shelves. I think many booksellers might be uncomfortable with the idea of being a 'tastemaker,' as Miller and others have phrased it, and that's a reasonable concern. But there's a humbler, more down to earth way of thinking about what blogs do, and Patrick hits on that: buying a book is an act of trust — in the author, the publisher, and the bookseller — and anything you can do to build a relationship with customers will help build that trust.

In hard times especially, people want to feel reasonably sure they're putting their money to good use. The better a person feels that they know a bookseller's tastes, breadth of knowledge, and character, the more inclined they'll be to trust that store's choices and recommendations. Blogs and other online spaces are perhaps the best way to do that; they're the twenty-first century version of the block party, the pub, the dinner party, the diner. The internet isn't like beaming a signal out of a radio tower, or even publishing a newsletter; it's a big group conversation, where acquaintances spread gossip and news, recommend books, and tell jokes — but you have to speak up to join in.

From the desk of David R. Godine

A Note on Bruce Rogers

People used to say of T. E. Lawrence that he had a genius for backing into the limelight. I think the same could be said of Bruce Rogers, the peripatetic American typographer, who probably has had more ink spilled over his work than any practitioner of the graphic arts of the book since Gutenberg. Rogers had certain natural talents, and among these were his abilities as a pasticheur; he could put himself into the skin of almost any century and make it his own. Nowhere are these talents displayed with more vigor and inventiveness than the books he produced in the sixteen productive years (1896-1912) he worked at The Riverside Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had big shoes to fill; D.B. Updike had left to start his own shop in 1893 and both Houghton and Mifflin saw the need for a captive private press that could produce first-rate editions and printing at moderate costs. They had the editorial taste; they had the plant at Riverside on the other side of the Charles; they had willing and skilled workman. What was needed was a leader who could both direct a program and oversee the details of design and production. In Rogers, they found the perfect candidate, a typographer who was able to take over a small corner of the enormous factory on the bank of the Charles, select the titles, and produce the volumes without regard to either estimates or costs.

This was the decade immediately following Morris's final efforts as a printer and designer and, above all, of the Kelmscott Chaucer, a book that appeared in 1896 and was, in so many ways, the culmination of Morris’s remarkable career as a craftsman and visionary. In its total integration of text and image, paper, printing, and ink, it would forever change what would be expected a privately printed edition and set the bar high (perhaps impossibly high) for any future "private press." Although Morris died shortly after DBU left Riverside, his influence was strong and pervasive on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps Rogers absorbed some of it; he could hardly not be aware of it. And how could he ignore it working in Boston alongside Goodhue, Copeland and Day, and the arts and crafts revival that took the region by storm? But BR was nothing if not eclectic and inventive, and his three decades at Riverside produced books that hearken back to Jean de Tournes and the French sixteenth century, to Bulmer and Bensley of the late seventeenth, and to Pickering and Whittingham of the mid- nineteenth. As I said, he could slip into almost any clothes and make them fit.

As Jerry Kelly makes clear in his fine appraisal of Rogers during this period, these were his happiest years. And it was no wonder, for he was given free reign, and was the highest paid employee at the plant, which must have grated the older workmen no end. BR could devote his attention (as did Morris) to every detail of the books’ production. Here is a small note from the Autumn 1905 announcement of Riverside Press Editions:

"For more than two years, the question of ink has occupied his (i.e. BR’s) attention, and now, after many trials, failures, and partial successes, it is believed that a thoroughly satisfactory printing ink has been obtained. Made only of the finest materials, and ground with special care, in a shop whose proprietor is the only workman, the result is a black ink of unusual density and richness, and without gloss. A red has also been produced, not brilliant, but full, clean, and of absolute permanency."

Rogers neglected to point out that it also cost $6.00/can, probably five times the going rate.

But to say that Rogers was “happy” is also not saying much, for BR was never, it seems to me, a very happy man. If you read his letters to Henry Watson Kent at the Metropolitan, he was always unsatisfied with something or someone — the climate, the food, the printing equipment, the heating system. Although they lived and worked in the same city, he and Updike were like oil and water, and while they were careful to respect each other's work and DBU went to bat for Rogers on any number of occasions, they were clearly uncomfortable in each other's company. This is not surprising; each was thorny and prickly characters in their own way; Updike clearly unhappy and repressed, and Rogers, although later married and a father, never displaying much loyalty to or affection for anything but his work, which always seemed to take precedence over the comfort or happiness of his family (at least if his letters are to be trusted). But at Riverside, Rogers was really his own boss and the cock of the roost. For his sixteen years in Cambridge, until he finally lost the support of the management after Henry Houghton’s passing in 1906, he had every reason to be “happy”; he was being paid the equivalent of $110,000/year, he had a full compliment of trained workmen at his disposal, and until some bright eyed accountant began looking at the real costs of the operation, he had the support of the publishing firm and management. Many of his editions sold out before publication. But the writing was on the wall. In a letter to Henry Louis Bullen, Rogers understands how precarious his position really was at the plant:

"The plain fact is that it doesn’t pay — at least not well enough to please the newer and younger element in the firm, and in the general retrenchment going on, my head, as that of the highest salaried man in the concern, was naturally one of the first to fall. I am really greatly pleased, though I haven’t any idea what I shall do."

By 1912, BR had left Riverside, although for two years (at east) the firm continued to issue books from his plans and designs. They were, and remain, among the most beautiful books ever produced by a large commercial establishment whose objectives were to make both beautiful books and a profit. But in this case, at last under Houghton, the books came first and BR himself said that only the books he printed while at Riverside Press “give me a definite satisfaction.”

Spring 2009 Catalog

You can now download our Spring 2009 Catalog from www.godine.com — the list includes Desert, the "definitive breakthrough as a novelist" of our current Nobel Laureate, J.M.G. Le Clézio; The Mower, selected verse by the sitting British Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion; stunning theater photography by Angus McBean; a trilogy of novels, Lark Rise to Candleford, that is currently airing as a miniseries on PBS, and more — Godine, apparently, does not flounder. We're really as shocked by this as anyone else.

~ Nota Bene ~
“People who want only to live, and who reckon living is absolute freedom, the exclusive pursuit of happiness, the sole satisfaction of their desires and instincts, the immediate enjoyment of the boundless riches of the world — Jérôme and Sylvie had taken on this vast programme for themselves — such people will always be unhappy. It is true, they would admit, that there are people for whom this kind of dilemma does not arise, or hardly arises, either because they are too poor and have no requirements beyond a slightly better diet, slightly better housing, slightly less work, or because they are too rich, from the start, to understand the import or even the meaning of such a distinction. But nowadays and in our part of the world, more and more people are neither rich nor poor: they dream of wealth, and could become wealthy; and that is where their misfortune begins.”

— from Things, a novella by Georges Perec

Washington Post's Book World

The New York Times reported yesterday that the Washington Post's long-standing and very well-regarded book review section, the Book World, is going to be rolled into the Opinion and Style & Arts sections, with the final stand-alone issue coming out February 15. While this isn't the first time that the Book World has found itself out of favor at the Post — Motoko Rich writes that it was similarly absorbed in 1973, only six years after its inception, before making a comeback in the early 1980s — it is certainly a bad sign for newspapers and book sections, and the book sections still in newspapers, when one of the contemporary pillars can't make it work. The number of reviews will only diminish slightly, they say, and the staff is not being cut, but still it's hard to imagine that the tenor and focus of reviews from here on will be unaffected by the material that now surrounds them; for myself, it would be strange to find Michael Dirda's column snug between a crossword and a review of "Lost." I do hope that the editors and staff there will be able to make up for lost column inches with online content.

From the desk of David R. Godine

Yesterday afternoon, I heard the news that John Updike has passed away. This is a sad turn of events for the world of letters, and also for this press — we had the privilege of publishing at least three of his Introductions and Prefaces, the first for our Nonpareil edition Edmund Wilson's "Memoirs of Hecate County," the last for Daniel Fuchs' "The Golden West." I have often argued, and in public, that if any American deserved, and had earned, the Nobel Prize for Literature, it was John Updike. He was a writer whose curiosity knew no bounds; he could do anything and, when it came to literature in its broadest sense, at one time or another he did do everything, even memorably recording Ted Williams' last time at bat at Fenway Park. His energy and his output were astounding. He wrote verse, criticism, short stories, an important string of novels, book reviews, essays, and he was no slouch as an art critic either. He was as much an advocate for foreign literature and foreign authors (a bias and distinction that should not have been lost on the Nobel Committee) as for the efforts of his American peers, and it could be argued that his lengthy and learned book reviews in The New Yorker did more to introduce unknown writers to an American audience than all other hype sites put together. He was among the fortunate Knopf authors (along with Julia Child) who had Judith Jones as his editor for almost his entire writing career, and among the very few Knopf authors who had total control of his jackets, which were not, to my mind, terribly distinguished, but showed a mind engaged in the process of design and typography. He was among a small handful of authors I ever encountered who could actually name more than one typeface and who had very pronounced opinions about all of them (including a peculiar and unfortunate affection for the designs of Frederic Goudy). He was, in short, our consummate man of letters (both written and drawn), the Boswell and the Johnson of the twentieth century. We will not see his likes again.

Wanda Coleman @ Harriet

Anyone who has read her widely-admired collection of essays The Riot Inside Me knows that Wanda Coleman is a woman who does not mince her words. Today at The Poetry Foundation blog, Harriet, the eminent Los Angeles poet, author, and essayist grieves for the state of American poetry. She writes, 'The chilling, if not complete silencing, of contemporary American poetry at peak bloom is an awful thing to watch. Educational factors are too numerous to mention; however, the insistence by the mainstream that poetry sell, the death of independent bookstores, book reviews, and the overall throes of a publishing world that must revamp or die, is brutally ugly.'

Enjoy!

Elizabeth David's Christmas on NPR

National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" today interviewed Florence Fabricant regarding our new title, Elizabeth David's Christmas. Fabricant reviewed the book for The New york Times, and is the regular food columnist there.You can listen to the interview by clicking HERE. The show's website reads, "Elizabeth David, perhaps the most celebrated English food writer of the past century, enjoys a place in British cooking and culture akin to that of Julia Child in the United States. Now a new cookbook, Elizabeth David's Christmas, details the late writer's wisdom and recipes."

In the Forest of Paradoxes

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio's complete, translated, Nobel Lecture is now available at the Nobel Prize Website. He begins, 'Why do we write? I imagine that each of us has his or her own response to this simple question. One has predispositions, a milieu, circumstances. Shortcomings, too. If we are writing, it means that we are not acting. That we find ourselves in difficulty when we are faced with reality, and so we have chosen another way to react, another way to communicate, a certain distance, a time for reflection.'

Prospector is in!

2008 Nobel Prize—winner J.M G. LeClézio's The Prospector is in and ready to ship! Order today – it makes a great holiday present.

Lark Rise to Candelford on PBS, January 2009

We've just heard some very exciting news: PBS has purchased the rights to a 10-part BBC miniseries based on Lark Rise to Candelford, by Flora Thompson. The miniseries is scheduled to air in January 2009, and her single-volume trilogy will be available from Godine just in time.

From the Godine description: Flora Thompson (1876–1947) wrote what may be the quintessential distillation of English country life at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1945, her three books Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941), and Candleford Green (1943) were published together in one elegant volume, and this new Godine Nonpareil edition, complete with charming wood engravings, should be a cause for real rejoicing.

"Flora Thompson's great memoir of her Oxfordshire girlhood [is] a model of the form. The richness of the language, the lingering over detail and incident creates a haunting classic."
– The New York Times

Le Clézio at NPR

At the National Public Radio website, listen to a short portrait of this year's Nobel Prize winner, and to Emmanuel Lenain read from Godine's own title, The Prospector. Let's hope there are a few more shows on Le Clézio!

Le Clézio Roundup

There has been plenty of press – as is to be expected – on yesterday's announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The New York Times describes laureate Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio as an author "whose work reflects a seemingly insatiable restlessness and sense of wonder about other places and other cultures," and the Los Angeles Times supports that assessment with this quote from the author: "Western culture has become too monolithic. . . The entire unknowable part of the human being is obscured in the name of rationalism. It is my awareness of this that has pushed me towards other civilizations."

The Washington Post reports on the new Nobel-winner with one eye here at the states, "There was little joy among New York publishers at this year's Nobel news. With recent winners such as Britain's Doris Lessing and Turkey's Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel laureates' American publishers could count on cleaning up with increased sales of backlist titles. But no major publisher in this country since Atheneum, more than 30 years ago, has bothered with translations of Le Clézio's work. This left the celebrating to small publishers such as David Godine."

And at Publisher's Weekly you can get a quick glimpse into life here at Godine through this classic David Godine quote. "David R. Godine published The Prospector in 1993. An ebullient Godine recalled a walk among the booths at Frankfurt, where, he said, he asks the same question of most foreign publishes each year: Who are your great writers who aren’t in English? 'Anne-Marie Solange, at Gallimard – she’s always bitching that Americans don’t read French writers. So I asked her the question. She gave me three names – Sylvie Germain, Patrick Modiano and J.M.G. Le Clezio. I published all three, and for the right reasons. And now one pays off!' Godine said, 'I must’ve been on drugs' when he discovered he originally printed 6,000 copies of The Prospector, but was happy to find he had 500 copies in stock – all of them spoken for in a matter of hours after the Nobel announcement [almost—ed.]. The Boston-based house will go back to press for a paperback version, and has another Le Clézio book already in the works, Le Désert, due next year."

Le Clézio: Nobel Prize 2008

David R. Godine, Publisher, is proud to announce that J.M.G. Le Clézio – author of The Prospector, the first title in our Verba Mundi Series – is the recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature.

In 1993, Godine published Le Clézio’s The Prospector (Le chercheur d’or, Gallimard, 1985) as the inaugural book of the Verba Mundi series, offering the best of modern world literature in translation, including works by José Donoso, Isaac Babel, Georges Perec, and others. A novel rich with sensuality and haunting resonance, The Prospector tells of one man’s obsessive search for a legendary buried treasure – and, through it, for the “lost gold’ of his childhood. The quest takes him from the lush tropical island of Mauritius to the hell of the first World War, and from a mysterious love affair to a shattering confrontation with his own motives. The Prospector was praised in France as “a parable of the human condition” (Le Monde), a “fabulous story” (Liberation), and “an ambitious, masterful book” (Le Point).

“Hypnotic and mythic … Le Clézio brilliantly conveys the sublime and terrible beauty of life and its twin, death, in devastating evocations … a remarkable work.” – ALA Booklist (starred review)

“A gentle portrayal of a man haunted by visions of his ideal childhood … [Le Clézio’s] writing is deeply evocative and descriptive.” – Publishers Weekly

“An entertainment of the highest order that neither diminishes nor insults the intelligence and emotions of the reader.” – Chicago Tribune

“The Prospector offers a wonderful one-volume compendium of all the grand myths rooted in the European colonial experience, combining elements from Paul et Virginie, Robinson Crusoe, and Indiana Jones….A key text” – Washington Post Book World

For further information, please contact Susan Barba, Editor, 617- 451-9600, ext. 26.

The Likes of Us

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have just received word that The Likes of Us: Photography & the Farm Security Administration has finally, after many years of hard work, arrived in our warehouse. From the book's page at our website:

Housed at the Library of Congress, the archives of the Farm Security Administration constitute an essential visual record of American life from the late 1920s through the onset of the Second World War. Guided by the adroit hands and watchful eyes of the master photo editor Roy Stryker, the FSA archive includes the work of dozens of photographers, from acknowledged giants like Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and Dorothea Lange to Marion Post Wolcott and Russell Lee, whose names and work may be less familiar.

Stryker's approach to his photographers' assignments was a bracing mix of structure and improvisation. He sent his artists across the country to shoot for a few weeks, mostly in small towns and rural areas. They worked from what Stryker called shooting scripts – laundry lists of possible subjects and situations – but were always free to explore their own perspectives on a locale, its inhabitants, and their activities. When negatives and prints arrived, Stryker would guide his artists with suggestions, advice, and sharp-eyed criticism, all designed to elicit their best work. At this he was strikingly successful.

This book collects work from nine of these trips – Evans in Louisana and Alabama, Shahn in West Virginia, Lange in California, and others – uniting them with Stryker's shooting scripts, letters, and other relevant archival documents. What emerges, beyond the images themselves, is a complex and vital overview of the FSA at work, not just the work, but how the work evolved and matured under Stryker's guidance. Appropriately, the book concludes with photographs of New Orleans, the only city photographed in depth by the FSA artists.

Reproduced in duotone, the 175 photographs in The Likes of Us – all printed from the original negatives at the Library of Congress – offer a rare opportunity not only to see a choice selection of famous and little-known images but also to understand the working of one of the government's most original and creative pre-war initiatives.

William Logan Poem of the Day

This is a bit of nota bene. Today's poem over at Poetry Daily is "The Fatal Shore," a fine piece of verse by William Logan. The poem is from his new collection, Strange Flesh, forthcoming from Penguin. Until then, have your fill of Logan's work with two titles from Godine – Difficulty and Sullen Weedy Lakes.

Kenneth Burke and WALL-E

Inside Higher Education explores the connection between the new hit Disney / Pixar film WALL-E and author Kenneth Burke. Scott McLemee writes that 'Burke’s fiction and poetry tend to be overlooked by chroniclers of American literary history. But his experimental novel Towards a Better Life has exercised a strong influence on other writers — especially Ralph Ellison, whose Invisible Man was deeply shaped by it. He also had a knack for being in interesting places at the right time. For example, he discovered and made the first English translation of Thomas Mann’s "Death in Venice"; and in the course of his day job as editor for The Dial, Burke helped prepare for its initial American publication a poem called “The Wasteland,” by one T.S. Eliot.'

Overlooked no more! Burke's Here & Elsewhere: Collected Fiction is on sale at the Black Sparrow Books website, just $11.00 for the softcover edition only through our website.

Davenport at Harper's

This weekend at the Harper's blog Wyatt Mason discusses Godine's own The Geography of the Imagination, by Guy Davenport. Mason writes that the collection is 'one of the twentieth century’s most varied, diverting, probing and re-readable works of thought and prose. . . . its forty essays on literature and art have provided a generation of writers and readers a continuing education on how to look, think, write, feel.'

Aftershocks – New Arrival!

The newest Verba Mundi has just arrived in our warehouse – Grete Weil's collection of short stories, Aftershocks – and it is available right now through the Godine website! Weil's stories powerfully explore the role of immigrants and displaced people though the lens of post-Holocaust Jews scattered across America. It is a moving, artfully constructed collection of stories, translated from the German by John Barrett.

Adam Kirsch wrote of Weil, in The Boston Phoenix, that 'In her desire to bear witness to the Holocaust . . . Weil wisely doesn't attempt to show us what it is like to be a victim or a murderer; [she] shows us what it is to be a bystander. And, as she delicately suggests, we are all bystanders to something.' You can also read Ben Lytal's review of Aftershocks at The New York Sun.

Bob Williams at Three Percent reviewed George Perec's classic avant-garde 'novel', Life A User's Manual. He writes, 'Life is thus a collection of tales – and especially of tales within tales. Despite the persistently urban setting, Life is in the oldest of literary traditions, that of the storyteller. . . . a masterful assembly of lunatic scholars and assorted eccentrics as they pursue slightly or very demented goals. There is humor and humanity in all this and every detail is richly rewarding, the kind of book rewarding enough to forever leave the reader breathless and gratified.'

Skylight Books is a fine local bookstore in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, specializing in literary fiction, cinema, and LA-related titles. This weekend they revive the Revolution-era practice of the salon (what a great idea!), and the topic of conversation just happens to be the catalogue of David R. Godine, Publisher.

To wit, 'Yearning for witty repartee and intellectual stimulation? How about wine and hors d'oeuvres? Come join us for our new monthly series, Skylight Salon, where our staff shares their faves from small presses and independent publishers. A modern-day mixer for the literary minded. This month: Monica highlights the David R. Godine, Inc., a sweet little publishing house out of Boston, MA that puts only the best fiction and nonfiction that wouldn't get published otherwise. Home of Black Sparrow Books as well as Verba Mundi, this a diverse publisher with a superb list of beautifully bound books with intellectual weight.'

Linda Bamber Reading

Black Sparrow's own Linda Bamber, author of the debut collection of poetry Metropolitan Tang, will be reading at the legendary Blacksmith House at 56 Brattle Street in Cambridge this upcoming Monday, April 28, at 8:00 pm. She will be reading with fellow poet Ann Killough. If you're in the area on Monday night, we hope to see you there!

Jonathan Williams

We were sad to hear of the recent passing of Jonathan Williams, a wonderful avant-garde author and photographer, and the founder of The Jargon Society Press. He was a student of Black Mountain College, like so many of the great artists of his generation, and as an independent publisher supported the careers of many important authors: Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, and Robert Duncan, to name a few. In 2002 Godine published a selection of his photographs accompanied by short biographical entries, entitled A Palpable Elysium. Included within are portraits of Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and others. We offer the book at a special rate through our website, in honor of this American original.

Leland Kinsey – Burlington Free Press

Sally Pollack at The Burlington Free Press reviews Leland Kinsey's new collection of poems, The Immigrant's Contract in the "Big Ideas" section. She writes that 'Kinsey's book-length poem functions nonetheless as biography and history – and as an original and riveting form of both. His work is a strong and moving evocation of a person, a place and a way of living that exist no longer.'

Motion in the Times II

Another review of Andrew Motion's memoir In the Blood in the New York Times today. Richard Eder writes that 'Andrew Motion, Britain’s current poet laureate, has written a childhood memoir that is Arcadian in the first or golden sense, though not without pain. . . . The memoir’s energy lies less in a vital urge to face the past than in an urge to shape it with language.'

Arthur Krystal Interview

At BiblioBuffet, there is a great interview with Arthur Krystal, and some very kind words about his collection of essays The Half-Life of an American Essayist. Lisa Guidarini writes, 'Whether writing on topics such as beauty, sin or laziness, literary essayist Arthur Krystal embodies the very best of what the essay should be: informative, interesting and eclectic. Elucidating his subjects by way of his at literary yet accessible style, his refreshingly snarky wit shines through in a way that’s completely endearing. It’s hard to imagine a more delightful or appealing combination in an essayist.'

The Immigrant's Contract, Kingdom Books

Kingdom Books in Vermont has posted a very nice review at their website of our upcoming collection of poems The Immigrant's Contract, by Leland Kinsey. Beth Kanell writes, 'There it is: That taste of a tongue that's word-swollen from another time and another experience. . . . Here's what Philip Levine might sound like if he'd been raised among the water and wood mills of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, instead of finding his way in the factories of Detroit.'

Toad to a Reviewer

Toad to a Nightingale, Godine's second collaboration of the brothers Leithauser, was reviewed in the Boston Globe this week, along with XJ Kennedy and Kenneth Koch:

'Light verse of an elegantly whimsical bent has long been a sideline trade for the industrious poet and novelist Brad Leithauser, who nevertheless once likened the genre to the Carolina parakeet, a candy-colored chatterbox that's been extinct for more than a century. One gathers he wasn't entirely kidding, which would explain why he seems determined not to let the charms and graces of larksome versifying die out.

Leithauser's latest collaboration with his brother, Mark, an artist and senior curator at the National Gallery of Art, has the retro feel of a cozy fireside picture book, but it's no antiquarian bauble: Arrayed in eight constellations of sprightly lyric sequences, mainly composed in neatly turned octaves and fine-tuned haiku stanzas, the poems brim with an urbane jeu d'esprit that knows the difference between the winsome and the twee, leaving no doubt as to just how much exacting discipline the delectations of sparkling light verse entail. Bracketing the book's mixed bag of impish bagatelles (ranging from "Periodic Riddles" on "Neon" and "Uranium" to a clutch of eldritch nocturnes called "Furnishings of the Moon") is a lively flyting match between the heralded songster and the lowly amphibian of the title, and anyone with a rooting interest in the survival of poetic wit and fancy should find it heartening as well as fitting that the underdog toad gets the last word: "Earth's fairest dreams are born of earth - / Born sometimes, even in the scummy Ooze of a drainage ditch . . . including those / Where I am your ventriloquist, / And you, my dear, my dummy." '

Congratulations Newton Award Winners

From the desk of The Daily Gazette: 'Swarthmore’s Newton competition is the oldest college book collection competition in the nation. Students vying for the top three places submit annotated bibliographies of their book collection, which are judged by committee of librarians and a faculty member. . . . First-place winner Jake Brunkard’s collection consists of about 65 books published by Black Sparrow Press, an independent press that publishes “underground” literature.' Glad we could help!

In the Blood – NY Times Review

A very nice review of this beautiful memoir by the British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion – Langdon Hammer of The New York Times describes In the Blood as 'superbly clear, intimate and evocative,' and writes that 'The power of this sad, attractively modest memoir comes in his resistance, which can only fail, to the demandthat he grow up.'

Keep an eye on our events listings (to the left of this column) for Motion's readings and appearances in New York this Spring.

Holocaust – The Boston Review

A really insightful and generous review from Kathryn Crim at The Boston Review, of Charles Reznikoff's moving long poem, Holocaust. Crim writes that Holocaust 'remains open like a photograph, shocking and repellent. Unlike a photograph, however, we cannot easily turn away from it; its length demands engagement with these atrocities for the duration and requires us to become – as the poet became – a witness. . . . The reissue of Holocaust and the resurrection of its modest author argues for the kind of moral vision and voice perhaps only poetry provides.'

Country of Pointed Firs

At the So Many Books blog, Stephanie has posted a very sweet review of Sarah Orne Jewett's classic novella The Country of Pointed Firs. Stephanie writes that the book was 'filled with moments that made me laugh. There were some that made me cry too and others that were so beautiful they took my breath away.' In finishing the book, she writes, she 'felt like I was leaving home.' A perfect sentiment. The Godine edition is gorgeously illustrated with by Douglas Alvord.

Jazz & Twelve O'Clock Tales – The Village Voice

The reviews for Wanda Coleman's new collection of short stories Jazz & Twelve O'Clock Tales just keep rolling in. Yesterday in the Village Voice Carol Cooper wrote, 'Coleman's musical ear allows her to capture subtle differences in class, regional origin, self-confidence, and aspiration with every word her characters utter. She reveals the complex inner lives of hipsters and hustlers, actors and addicts, all striving as they struggle with romance, racism, and economics. These portraits are sympathetic but unsentimental, drawn with almost surgical precision to encapsulate problematic aspects of black America's reality. It's Coleman's particular genius to make sense of these puzzle pieces; once she puts them together, they read like a map of psychological trigger points for personal growth and transformation.'

You can also listen to the ecstatic NPR review of the book from 'All Things Considered,' and read the review from Joan Frank at the San Francisco Chronicle.