Max did you realy get rid of your old books how scarey-even your first books
so nice to hold an old friend -
steel nib pens and ink from ink wells.!!and I never got to be ink monitor:-(
but I suppose thatI am one self appointed now!!
Thanks Patrick mc
Ps why did you sell them??
-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Max Richards
Sent: 10 May 2006 03:43
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: snap 10 May 06
Marginalia: Little Infinity
My old Nonesuch Blake -
first hardback I ever bought -
surprises me: it's in good nick,
given long years of heavy use,
these pencil markings proving this.
My teenage hand still showed my schooling -
that old New Zealand primary system
in our day put us through much drilling,
the twelve times table, handball skills,
schoolyard lining-up and marching,
choral verse speaking with rounded vowels!
slow, correct handwriting -
steel nib pens and ink from ink wells.
Fountain pens were pricey
standard gifts and prizes.
Then high school put one's perfect hand
under pressure: write all this down!
(About this time ballpoints arrived,
unstoppable though disapproved.)
Some wrote fast and neat, not me -
in my case haste produced a scrawl
which only I could read at all,
though when allowed to take my time
I could write elegantly still.
Leafing through my Nonesuch Blake
I glimpse in margins and on end-
papers both my 'hands'. The hours I'd take
pondering The Contrary States
of the Human Soul!
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell!
When would my doors of perception
definitely be cleansed? Soon, oh soon.
The sooner if I marked its margin.
I would have bought a paper Blake -
which Auckland's bookshops simply lacked.
Shops with Penguins drew me in
for fiction, 'classics' (half a crown) -
I doted on Voltaire's Candide -
but poetry shelves were rather thin.
'Q' was the favoured editor of
anthologies I couldn't afford.
Everyman books at five shillings
covered well the ancient world,
though some of their translations
needed translating themselves.
American books? Only in trickles.
We were in the sterling zone; these
were the early and mid 'fifties;
New York ruled on book dominion,
the other remained with London.
The shortage also of US dollars
doomed their books to be as scarce
as were their cars on Auckland streets.
We gaped to glimpse a Studebaker.
Faber and Faber's anglicised
T.S.Eliot authorised
for few Americans a slot
in his modern moderenish
modernist canon.
Marianne Moore - for me, no turn-on.
But I bought up all of hardback Auden -
and how he did get written on...
Lawrence on the Americans
inspired me to order in
a softback Portable Walt Whitman
whose ill-glued spine spilled copiously
leaves of grassy paper on me.
The only Melville was Modern Library.
My next hardback was a Wallace Stevens,
opulent book for poetic opulence.
In his cool calm Collected
my pencillings continued.
But now, my treasures,
it's time to shift you -
my old pleasures,
time to sift you.
Finite shelf space, finite 'time left'
require new measures.
Blake, I'm sorry
to confess this drift:
I perceive in me
little infinity.
These old books won't earn their keep -
ask a dealer to buy some cheap.
Old Nonesuches look delectable
and Faber hardbacks collectable.
Some dealer's listings may come about:
'foxing, pencil marks throughout'.
Asking price, three times at least
what he gave me for them, the beast.
Max Richards
Doncaster, Melbourne
7-10 May 2006
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