Poetry Month Series: Leland Kinsey

{In honor of National Poetry Month, Godine and Black Sparrow poets will be periodically commenting upon their work, their writing process, and the art of poetry.}

"Into the Badlands"

The high plains were in late light,
but the bottom of the river-, wind-, and rain-torn
gorges below us lay dark. If I’d descended
the steep hand carved road at night,
I wouldn’t have realized the size
of the vestibule of hell I was entering.
The tops of crags and hills looked red,
as if moss-covered, but from the near slope I could see
it was all rusted rock, as though you’d taken
the peen of a hammer and busted
metallic stone to a pebble debris.
Here and there large pieces of the same rock
sat like birettas atop free-standing Wgures,
fat or thin, of rock like concrete.
Hoodoos. Minor gods to the Indians,
who, like me, hadn’t known the world was so old.
Smudges fumed by the camp as we arrived,
the men sat with nets on their heads,
mosquito season, a soft storm of insects.
Sternberg, the old man himself, said they’d exposed
so many bones they’d have to trust
I was any good. Said he’d dug here
for several years now, the best dinosaur hunting
in the world. A fellow named Barnum Brown
had been earlier, but others just ruined their Wnds.
The Sternbergs had been called in to get the fossils
out of the diYcult stone. “Barnum dug all over
my diggings in Wyoming,” he said,
“and then brought his tents and act up here.
He shipped to the great museums of the world,
and the Canadians decided to keep some bones
home, and brought us in.” First lessons.

The Wrst morning I drove a team far
up a creek bed. I headed for three perfectly rounded
hills, the tois tits I thought, each topped
with a small stony cap like a nipple.
Their lower sides looked like beech bark
deeply scarred by bear claws. I soon lost
sight of them in the ridges, hummocks, ledges,
tunnels, and outwashes, switchbacks,
small canyons, terraces, and lofty outcrops.
Sternberg would later lend me a book
detailing the tortures of early travelers
trying to Wnd their way across this tortuous land.
I found my way up to a ledge where a skull
lay half dug out. Teeth like bowie knives,
eye sockets the size of my head. One son
was already starting to plaster. Tissue paper
went on Wrst, to keep the plaster from sticking,
he said, when they Wnally cleaned the whole thing
in weeks or months of work. Then he laid
on strips of cloth soaked in plaster.
Once the top was done I waited hours
while they dug underneath with hand tools
and small brushes, turned the skull over
on the now hardened cast and did likewise
to the rest till it all was encased, and loaded it
on a small pallet-like skid. My work began,
to get the horses to drag that heavy
new-made mummy down with little jarring
and no breakage through a bad stretch
of badlands to the wagon landing
near where the scows were tethered
to the river shore.
There seemed an odd echo.
My grandfather had told how he worked
for several years in the century before
making "Mummy Paper."

{ed: "Mummy Paper" is the title of the next section of this longer piece, titled "Alberta Wheat Fields;" many of the poems in this collection are linked thusly.}

Traveling to do research for a poem may seem like an odd idea, but in the fall of 2004 that’s what I set out to do. A French-Canadian immigrant, whom I’d met as an old man had gone by rail from northern Vermont to the Alberta wheat fields to work horses in the nineteen-teens. Besides doing that, he’d wound up hauling bones out of the dinosaur badlands. I drove only during the day, to see what he’d seen. Twelve hours a day, 725 miles a day for three days, and I was in Medicine Hat. I camped in the badlands near where paleontologists camped as they dug the richest fossil beds in the world. Coyotes and mule deer moved past my tent in the night. Lightly colored prairie falcons whirling overhead during the day reminded me of standing under eastern pale chanting goshawks over the Serengeti, about which I written in my previous book, and the landscape had similarities as well. I hiked deep into the dry digging areas during the day. I happened to meet a man and his young daughter on a trail; I asked him about his family in the area. His grandparents had moved from Minnesota in 1914 as the wheat lands opened. We talked long past his daughter’s tolerance. I also stopped at local historical societies, and aged general stores to meet oldsters. I drove through lands owned by the Blackfoot and the Blood, Indians with whom the immigrant had had dealings. And I spent a good deal of time at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, one of the world’s great fossil collections, up the Red Deer River from the badlands. Then three more days driving home in late fall, the time the immigrant returned those years he went. Material from that trip wound up in ten pages in the long poem “Alberta Wheat Fields,” and its subsections “Into the Badlands,” and “City of Geese,” in my book The Immigrant's Contract. My trip gave my character’s voice veracity.

(This poem appears in Leland Kinsey's collection The Immigrant's Contract.)

Banville at The Paris Review

The Paris Review "Art of . . ." interview series is probably the finest of its type, allowing readers to see into the working mind of beloved authors; it has also, in the most recent issue, reached its 200th installment, and their bicentenary author is John Banville, winner of the prestigious Man-Booker Prize and author of, among many other fine novels, Mefisto and The Newton Letter. (via Mark Sarvas) From other interviews I've seen, Banville is extraordinarily open and articulate about his writing and the process of writing in general. From the interview:

BANVILLE: It all starts with rhythm for me. I love Nabokov’s work, and I love his style. But I always thought there was something odd about it that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Then I read an interview in which he admitted he was tone deaf. And I thought, that’s it—there’s no music in Nabokov, it’s all pictorial, it’s all image-based. It’s not any worse for that, but the prose doesn’t sing.

Poetry Month Series: Linda Bamber

[In honor of National Poetry Month, Godine and Black Sparrow poets will be periodically commenting upon their work, their writing process, and the art of poetry.]

“Suddenly The City”
I live in seems interesting
as if I were on vacation here
and feeling indulgent
towards the human race, its way of
living in cities and
tearing up roads so the traffic has to be
re-routed around a collapsing white mesh barrier
as in this intersection here.
The people of this city
walking back and forth on the sidewalks
each one having gotten up and dressed this morning
look like this, this
movie, almost, of people crossing the street.
The questions,
is this scene in any way rewarding to look at?
e.g., architecturally, in terms of city spaces and human interest; and
are things diverse enough here? and
are these people, in general,
older of younger than I am? just now are
in abeyance. In their absence is this
pleasant sense that there are many cities in the world
and this is one of them.
It rained earlier. I think I’ll go see the monks
make a sand mandala on the Esplanade; and
who knows, later I might get a sandwich.

“Procrastination Over, I get to Know Some Students”
One is bashful
like a woman raised in a different tradition,
some downcast, sidelong, hand-to-mouth
(to hide a smile) tradition.
Honored to be talking of Ideas,
she has dyed her hair
bright pink – wrong, wrong,
as is the eyebrow ring
on this grad-school-bound great big
girl with great
mind-mouth coordination. Another
is slender and discontent.
She stands, I sit, she, impatient, shifts
long straight black hair. A stabled
horse. What’s this class about? She says. Nothing real.
What would be real is World War I
or II. I extend a carrot on a hand, which
she sniffs, but doesn’t seize;
snorts, wheels, leaves.
I am relieved
as when particularity returns
to winter days. Yesterday the snow was pock-marked.
Now great
sleet and haze.

I teach a course on Buddhism and American poetry, and Buddhist ideas are an essential part of my inner life; but sometimes I wonder whether any of my own poems would qualify for inclusion in the course. Perhaps the Buddhist ideas are more part of the process than the manifest content of my poetry. A Buddhist concept we are all familiar with is that happiness is in the here and now, however repetitive or mundane things may seem at the time. In the two preceding poems I seem to have written about moments that might not have seemed poem-worthy if I weren’t enough of a Buddhist to think that all moments are created equal. The first, “Procrastination Over,” concerns the teaching life (a topic that is almost universally avoided by American poets – although 95% of them teach!) All teachers long for more time for ‘our own work’ and at times resent our repetitive task. Didn’t we just teach a load of students last semester? Why does it have to be done again now? The same might be said, of course, of brushing one’s teeth, getting groceries, filling the tank with gas. How can we show up for the exasperating banality that characterizes so much of life? Each cohort of new students leaves after a few months, only to be replaced by a new cohort, and so on ad infinitum. “Procrastination Over” is about a moment when I stopped resisting my boring task and finally gave it my all. Of course what happened was that not only my students but life itself became interesting: “Yesterday the snow was pockmarked; now, great sleet and haze.” Attend to one thing fully, say the Buddhist teachers, and everything snaps into focus. “Suddenly the City” takes a slightly different approach, diagnosing the mental afflictions that make life dull: judgment and comparison. “Don’t compare,” says Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. In the blessed, momentary absence of comparison, I had an experience of my city and myself as perfectly okay. Just then, everything was of equal weight. Tibetan monks on the banks of the Charles River, in Boston? Nothing to comment on. A sandwich for lunch? How remarkable! Truly, for a moment there, I got it.

(Both poems above appear in Linda Bamber's debut collection, Metropolitan Tang.)

Poetry Month Series: Wes McNair

[In honor of National Poetry Month, Godine and Black Sparrow poets will be periodically commenting upon their work, their writing process, and the art of poetry.]

"After My Stepfather's Death"
Again it is the moment when I left home
for good, and my mother is sitting quietly
in the front seat while my stepfather pulls me
and my suitcase out of the car and begins
hurling my clothes, though now
I notice for the first time how the wind
unfolds my white shirt and puts its slow
arm in the sleeve of my blue shirt and lifts them
all into the air above our heads so beautifully
I want to shout at him to stop and look up
at what he has made, but of course when I turn
to him, a small man, bitter even this young
that the world will not go his way, my stepfather
still moves in his terrible anger, closing the trunk,
and closing himself into the car as hard as he can,
and speeding away into the last years of his life.

(from The Town of No & My Brother Running,
and the forthcoming Lovers of the Lost: New and Selected Poems)

Note from the Poet
This poem is based on a traumatic event I experienced as a teenager when my stepfather became violent, as he sometimes did, and I had a hard time writing the piece because the facts of what actually happened kept getting in my way. Looking back I remembered how the shirts my stepfather threw landed on the hay stubble alongside the road, and I was drawn to how the stubble poking up through the shirts imitated the hurt I felt. Only when I changed my description and showed him throwing the shirts into the air did the poem begin to feel right, and after the revision came to me, I saw why. Through my stepfather’s gesture of releasing the shirts and creating something beautiful by accident, I had suggested his submerged creative life and a connection between him and me that the son misses and the older narrator observes. In my mind as I rewrote my poem was my stepfather’s artistic self: the soap carvings he saved from his childhood and the awkward drawings he hung in the family house. By making him, to my own surprise, a sympathetic figure whose anger separates him from that self, I reshaped my trauma into a kind of forgiveness.

A Note from Peter Bowler

[Peter is a longstanding Godine author. His Superior Person’s books about weird words and deceitful language have appeared in Godine lists since the mid-eighties, and are among our most beloved titles.]

I came across the Godine Blog site more or less by accident today, and was delighted to find that the firm is holding its head up in these difficult times; David’s comments in interviews make that clear. It speaks volumes for the cause of small, quality publishers that David can maintain previous business levels, that his direct mail drop has done surprisingly well, that he is not unduly affected by bookstore closures, and that he has even been able to buy in a lot of great British books lately. Well done, David! And, on top of that, there is the reflected light of a Nobel Prize, and the continuing readiness of DRG to publish creative writing that many other publishers can’t or won’t.

Those deranged people – my regular readers – may perhaps wonder what I am writing now. My current project is a novel. Subject matter: murder, madness, and mystery in the world of high-end record collecting! Adorned, needless to say, with my usual mixture of cheap humour and ill-conceived displays of recondite erudition. Will it win me the Nobel Prize? Hmmm . . . .

By the way, my email address is pbowler {at} nnsw {dot} quik {dot} com {dot} au, and I would love to hear from you.

Phillip Lopate on Charles Reznikoff

JBooks.com, the online Jewish book community, has posted Phillip Lopate's introduction to By the Waters of Manhattan, the novel by acclaimed author Charles Reznikoff, recently republished by Black Sparrow Books. Here is a brief excerpt, but please visit JBooks to read the rest of his excellent essay:

"Among those who cherish his tender, translucent, humane poetry, Charles Reznikoff is a venerated figure, a role model of integrity and sustained excellence. During most of his lifetime (1894-1976), he had been so underrated and neglected that he developed a kind of stoical, resigned shell, going his own way. In person (I saw him on numerous occasions before he died), Reznikoff gave off an obliging, almost meekly humble impression, but there was a stubborn will underneath; his dedication to his art was unshakeable. You can see it from his correspondence, that remarkable, moving record in Selected Letters of Charles Reznikoff, 1917-1976 (Black Sparrow Press, 1997). If publishers would not accept his poetry manuscripts, he would print them himself. He also had that grain of selfishness that all writers need, however annoying to their loved ones. Though his wife Marie yearned for years to quit her high school teaching job, Charles, the most devoted, uxorious of husbands, nevertheless would not become a go-getter. He refused to practice law, though he had a degree. Instead, he held down jobs that would afford him the mental freedom to pursue poetry and fiction: he wrote tedious legal definitions for textbooks, sold hats, and, ill-suited as he was temperamentally to service the Hollywood dream factory, polished screenplays for his boyhood friend, producer Albert Lewin.

Towards the end of his life, he was taken up by the younger members of the New York School of poetry and the descendents of the Objectivists, and treated reverently by them, like a fragile, priceless grandparent, a last link to the pioneers of the 20s and 30s. Reznikoff, glad for the appreciation, did not know quite what to make of it, just as he had been puzzled decades earlier when championed by Louis Zukofsky (whose abstruse criticism he could barely decipher) as a sort of instinctual Objectivist poet. The problem with that annexation was that Reznikoff was no primitive: he was extremely intelligent, rigorous, and, in his own non-showy way, committed to an ambitiously austere aesthetic program of his own"

Le Clezio Discusses Language

J.M.G. Le Clézio is the author of The Prospector and the forthcoming Desert

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."