In the introduction to his Three Talks (2018), Joshua Beckman spoke of the invitation to participate in The Bagley Wright Lecture Series, the invitation that originally prompted the collection. “When I was first asked to give these lectures,” he wrote, “I imagined the results as some refined expression of the concerns that have propelled me as an artist. I expected that a responsibility to the request and to the form would likely result in a comprehensive articulation of what had been for much of my life allowed to be a messy cosmos of impulse and sense. I looked forward to finding out what I had learned or what I had come to know, and I looked forward to sharing that with others.” I like the way he describes his ongoing thinking as “a messy cosmos of impulse and sense,” and the suggestion that to attempt to articulate these scattered thoughts would be as much useful for him to better understand as it would be to communicate that thinking to anyone else. There have been times I’ve only realized a clarification to my own thinking through responding to a particular question, or as I work through a review or an essay. Sometimes one doesn’t know what exactly one thinks until attempting to speak it.
My copy of Three Talks sits in a prime location in my home office. Whenever I’m presented with the question of ‘favourite books’ my mind immediately goes blank, but there are books I regularly set aside by my desk instead of on the poetry shelves in the living room, or on our fiction or non-fiction shelves. Unfortunately, this also means I don’t always know where I’ve temporarily put a particular volume, for those times I seek to revisit. Stacks upon stacks on the desk or the floor or on overflowing shelves, set aside for later and quickly buried by fresh layers of material. A quick scan from my chair sees Rosmarie Waldrop’s Driven to Abstraction (2010) and Blindsight (2003), Etel Adnan’s Shifting the Silence (2020), Journey To Mount Tamalpais (second edition, 2021) and Paris, When It’s Naked (1993); Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes (2002), A Likely Story: The Writing Life (1995) and The Crow Journals (1980). I see books by Stan Dragland: Journeys Through Bookland and Other Passages (1984) and the Bricoleur & his Sentences (2014). There is Clint Burnham’s The Only Poetry That Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (2011), Lorine Niedecker’s Lake Superior (2013) and Fred Wah’s So Far (1991). Every volume in the Best American Experimental Writing series. My extensive collections of Brick: A Literary Journal, The Believer, Fence magazine and Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory.
When you want to better know a reader, look at their bookshelves. Alternately: when you want to better know a writer, look upon and around where they write. In the piles of papers and books upon my desk this week are new titles by Camille Martin, Gary Barwin, Evan Kennedy, Vera Hadzic and Nick Thran, as well as a small mound of titles by Bernadette Mayer, Jenny Boully, Victoria Chang and Claire Schwartz. I finally have a copy of Julia Cohen’s Collateral Light (2013), although at the time of this writing I haven’t yet found the time to open it. I’ve half a dozen issues of The Paris Review stacked with Kyle Flemmer’s Barcode Poetry (2021) and my signed and dedicated copy of Kathleen Fraser’s il cuore : the heart: Selected Poems 1970-1995 (1997). I’ve a stack of Guy Birchard’s criminally-underrated prose poem collection Only Seemly (2018), purchased in bulk from Beth Follett when she was shutting down Pedlar Press. I gift copies of this from time to time, so if I have any left by the time you read this, you can certainly have one.
Despite our main poetry library held in our living room, my office shelves hold my collection of poetry titles by Susan Howe, Sarah Mangold and Pattie McCarthy, as well as various books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction by Sarah Manguso. I can see my tattered advance copy of Elizabeth Hay’s Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (1993), a book that changed the way I thought about non-fiction. Over the past few years, I’ve been exploring the prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins and Joy Williams, so copies of their works remain at close hand. I won’t even mention the dozens of trade collections of Marvel and DC, volumes that filter downstairs to the trade comic shelves as soon as I’m through them.
Is this how we speak of lineages, or simply of what sits through my current attention? Twenty or thirty years ago, this list would have been far different, offering instead a focus on and through titles by George Bowering, Richard Brautigan, Elizabeth Smart, bpNichol, John Newlove, Kristjana Gunnars, Dany Laferrière, etcetera. Might this matter?
Everything falls into lists, and lists begin to overwhelm, far more than they clarify. What are you reading? What are you rereading? “Now you have burned your books, you’ll go with nothing. / A heart.” wrote John Thompson, as part of “Ghazal XXXVII” in his posthumously-published Stilt Jack (1978). The life of the mind, as John Newlove called it. Ottawa poet Cameron Anstee, who follows his father’s approach to collecting: if a new book enters the house, another must leave. Both derek beaulieu and Gregory Betts, I’ve noticed, carve and craft their individual poetry libraries down to only essential volumes. I did have a partner at one point who did try to convince me to give all my books away. Can’t you just go to a library? Much of what I have might not be found in one’s local library; or at least, not easily. So many of these titles that sit as an extension of my thinking, and my perspective. The fragments and shapes of how I might see. For those of us who live within the boundaries of books, who might we be without them? Might we remain the same, or return to the clean slate?
There are lines of dialogue that have stayed with me, from Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #55 (June 1981), as the legendary Roger Stern wrote the villainous Nitro in his daughter Virginia’s apartment; it was an intriguing character detail that on the surface seemed extraneous, but offered a richness to the tension of that particular moment. “I see that things haven’t changed much since the last time I was here,” Nitro exclaims, almost as accusation, “same three story Soho walk-up, same carpet, same plants. Only your paintings are new. But then, you always paid attention to your art, didn’t you?”