Poetry is next to godliness?

I like to read, as you know, but I find myself all at sea with poetry. I am a prosaic sort of person, I suppose. I like a narrative, ideally not too tricksy, although the fantastic and the satirical suit me fine, better probably than the strictly down-to-earth. But poetry? That’s another matter. Too insubstantial? Maybe. Too intense? Sometimes. Too opaque? Almost always.

That’s not to say that I never enjoy poetry. I loved Keats and the metaphysical poets when we did them at school; that process of analysis that unlocked the meaning and left you, comprehending, to enjoy the words. I loved, still love, lots of funny poems for children: Edward Lear and Ogden Nash, A. A. Milne and Lewis Carroll, Michael Rosen and, oh, lots of others. I know some by heart, not from learning them, just from reading them over and over. When I was at school I used to sit near the poetry shelves in the library and pick up Ted Hughes when I was bored. I couldn’t get much meaning from it, but there was something in the language and the violence that appealed to the teenage me. And there’s the moment when only a poem will do, breakups and deaths, that sort of thing, bound to send you scurrying to the shelf for Emily Dickinson.

But these days, given the choice, do I make for the poetry shelves in a bookshop? No I do not. Do I keep a slim volume of someone or other by my bedside? That would be no too. I do not seek out poetry.

Poetry, it seems to me, is rather like faith. I do not get poetry in the same way that I cannot believe in God or gods. There is no logic in faith that satisfies me. And yet... I see people who do believe, perfectly sane, intelligent, admirable people, so logically there must be something, mustn’t there? And now and then, the faintest whiff of what it must be like to believe comes my way, funerals, weddings, births, that sort of thing, all heightened emotions and that feeling that there must be some greater being organising all this.

How is this like poetry? Poetry is a state of mind, I think. Some people hear or read poetry and something in it speaks to them, not necessarily everything, it could just be the sound of the words, or a single combination of words, or an image or a feeling conveyed. For me, it has always taken more than this. I need complete understanding, every word accounted for. That’s why I appreciated those poems I studied and picked apart at school I suppose, and the read and re-read A. A. Milne et al.

Lately though, I have begun to listen and enjoy poetry without necessarily understanding each word. I have the writers’ group I belong to to thank for this. I hear poetry read by its authors and I get to ask questions: “Why this word?” “Why does this line run on?” “Did you intend this effect?” It’s extraordinary, thinking about poetry in this way, from the poet's point of view, like something moveable and changeable.

So I have decided to embrace poetry. I would like poetry to speak to me. As I rooted around the house for poetry books (I found a few, no Ted Hughes though), I thought that what people need in order to enjoy poetry more is just to be exposed to it more. And since I have at my disposal the tame primary school where I go to run the library and talk to children about books, I came up with a poetry project I could run at school: lots of poems read, some learned, lots written. And the teacher I approached said yes, she’d love me to do this, she didn’t think she was good at poetry. Me neither, I said, but I’m hoping this will help.

The Bones of the Story

You know I’ve been writing some fiction lately. I don’t talk about it all that much, well I do, but only to a few people, because mostly it’s in my head and taking it out and showing it off isn’t going to help, and then there’s all the questions, you know, ‘so how much have you written?’ ‘when is it going to be published?’ all that. If I tell you, I tell you. If I don't, don't ask. Just take it from me, I’m writing. 

The thing is though, it’s making it very hard for me to read. It’s as if, as I read, I’m seeing the bones beneath everything all the time. I don’t mean that I’m noticing the mistakes, although I am of course, you can never turn off your editor’s eye. I mean I keep seeing the technical bits, like how the paragraphs are broken up and what punctuation the author’s using and how a character gets from A to B when nothing important is happening. These parts are necessary, of course they are, but I'm noticing them because I'm thinking about them all the time, trying to work out how to do these things myself, how to make these parts, the bones, invisible. I want to find out how to make sure the story takes the most direct path from the author’s brain to the reader’s, so that the the flow of the words creates a flow of story in the reader’s mind exactly as though the reader were watching a film, or maybe even thinking the story up for himself. Of course, there’s plenty of literature that wants you to take notice of its structure and its language, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the stuff that you gobble down for the pure joy of story. 

So what I’m wondering is this: is it possible, once you’ve started reading in this way, with a writer’s eye, to turn it off, to stop noticing how many times in a conversation the writer says ‘said X’ or ‘said Y’ to make sure you keep up, or how he or she slips in physical details about a character rather than giving you a straight description, or when the point of view changes and how? It’s useful for me to read this way right now, but I hope it won’t last because it definitely gets in the way of the story. And that’s the point, isn’t it? The bones should be invisible.

Gaps

It happened. All the books came down from the attic, out of their boxes, and onto the new shelves. Well, most of them. There was a little culling to fit in some of the non-fiction, a few duplicates to get rid of, and I had to put the French books and the picture books back up because there still isn’t room for them. I suppose the fact that no one’s going to want to read them justifies this, but you know by now that I’d rather have them where I can keep an eye on them.

The new shelves are in the passage, so that you walk past them all the time going from one end of the house to the other. What is it that is so pleasing about having ranks of books? I see the children running their hands along them as they pass. They ask about this one, that one. Robert and I pick books up, look, put them back. I suppose in time we won’t even see these books, like the pictures on the walls, but just now they are intensely distracting.

I can’t work out when I last had all of my books on shelves rather than in boxes. A lot of them were around when we moved here, sixteen years ago, but I think at that point most of the children’s books were in the attic. Then, when the girls started to read for themselves I swapped them all over, put the children’s books on the shelves and the adult ones in the attic. That would have been, what, eight years ago? The reference books have stayed down here though, in case they were needed, apart from a year or so when we were having building work. So for the past eight years, I’ve had a couple of shelves of books I’ve recently bought, or things I’ve brought down from the attic to read, kept in check by ruthless culling and consigning more boxfuls to the attic at regular intervals.

So you would think, wouldn’t you, that after all this time, having my books where I can see them would give me deep satisfaction. I wish I could tell you that it was so. But I find myself slightly dissatisfied. My first thought was that this was because of the Missing Books. Where is my copy of Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites? Where is Midnight’s Children? Why do I only have two of the books in William Golding’s Rites of Passage trilogy? Where is Lord of the Flies? I know, I’ve probably lent them to people, but I don’t know for sure, which is unsettling.

It’s not this though, that is the really source of my dissatisfaction. Looking at all the adult fiction I own, laid out like that in front of me, I feel that I do not have enough books. How can I explain this? I don’t mean that I should have kept the books I’ve culled over time. No. When I give away a book to a charity shop or a school I do so because I feel that I do not need to own it. I am not interested in ever reading it again, I doubt if I will specifically want to suggest to anyone else that they read it, it is not beautiful enough to keep for its looks alone, and I don’t need to keep it because it is part of a set. I don’t regret any of the books I’ve given away. What I regret is the books I haven’t bought.

There weren’t a lot of books in my house when I was a child. My mother is a library-goer. She rarely reads a book more than once and has no acquisitiveness as far as books are concerned. My father has never been a reader. My brother is, but I think when we were at home he felt no need to hold on to the books he’d read. Maybe he’s different now. But me, I wanted to keep all the books I’d read, and I wanted shelves and shelves of books I felt I might want to read one day. I satisfied this urge with secondhand books. Once a month in the town where we lived, there was an antiques fair. Tucked away in the corner was a secondhand bookstall where they sold books for 10p and 20p, all sorts of beautiful, musty-smelling old books. I would come away each month with piles of everything, anything, ideally in hardback, with the occasional lovely old orange Penguin, authors I’d vaguely heard of, for that price it didn’t really matter what I bought. I still have books I bought then that I haven’t read yet. And after that, I worked in bookshops. This was still the days of the Net Book Agreement, so of course I took advantage of my 33% discount (how would I resist?), going home most weeks with two or three shiny new paperbacks, new authors, prize winners, backlist titles for authors I already loved, genres I’d not yet tried.

There’s a gap after that though. We bought a house, which needed money; we had children, who are expensive. Secondhand books don’t cost 10p anymore, and anyway, I’ve never had enough shelves to put the books I already own on. I stopped buying random books. The books I buy now, and the ones on my wishlists, these are books I plan to read. But I still want more of those others, those ‘oh, that looks interesting’ kind of books that you fill the shelves with and pick up one day. Last week I read Lolita; I must have had it since before we moved here. For sixteen years or more this book has been waiting for me to read it. It was fabulous, a revelation. Would I have bought it new from a bookshop? Probably not. Would I have borrowed it from the library? Probably not. That’s why I need to redevelop my idle secondhand book buying habits. I want more of these random books, these chance finds lying about the house. And that, lovely husband, is why I still need even more bookshelves.

Keepsake

There are three boxes of books lying next to my new bookshelves. They’ll be the first to go on the shelves when I’ve finished painting them. These books aren’t part of the hundreds that lie still in the attic, waiting. These aren’t new. Most of them are by Terry Pratchett, just about every book he’s written, plus a lot of extra Discworld material, maps, guides, the science of Discworld, that sort of thing. The only things missing, as far as I can see, are the three nome books and I think I know why.

These are my Uncle Michael’s books. I say ‘are’, but Michael died almost a year ago, aged not quite 65. You’d imagine then that I’d say the books were Michael’s. I’ll always think of them as being Michael’s though, the way I think of the cast iron pan I use that belonged to my grandmother as being Gran’s pan. People give you strange things sometimes as keepsakes of people who died: things you don’t even remember seeing in their houses when they were alive, things you’ll never use, jewellery you’ll never wear. Michael’s Terry Pratchett books are a perfect keepsake. They are something that I know he loved, that he and I shared a love of, and that I will use, and as I do so think of my lovely uncle.

To tell the truth, it’s odd I haven’t got them all already. I have read the majority of them and will again, but mostly from the library though. I’d pounce whenever I came across one I hadn’t already read. They’re clever, and funny, and thoughtful, and there always seems to be some new twist that the plot can be lead down to embrace some new aspect of Discworld and gently poke fun at our own world. Why don’t I already own them all? I think perhaps I when I started reading them there were already too many out there. I felt I’d never catch up with them all, and what was the point if I couldn’t have the whole set? Who knows? Perhaps fate kept me from collecting them, so my shelves could be home to Michael’s collection. (If you’re wondering, the nome books are missing because, of all the stuff that Terry Pratchett wrote, these were the ones that Michael had no time for. I have only one of them myself, because Michael was right, and one is more than enough.)

Not long ago, when Michael retired, he made himself a library, a little room with books floor to ceiling and a comfortable chair to sit in. It was something he’d been planning for a while, a quiet reading place full of books. He showed it to me with such pride, this special space, and knew that I envied him it. I cannot begin to imagine how hard it must be for Sandra to dismantle Michael’s library, made for him to grow old in, but used for so little time.

I notice Michael’s books don’t have his name in. I do write in mine, the ones I plan to keep, generally my name and the date and place I first read the book. Not in the second hand ones though. I feel books I’ve bought second hand belong in some way to the person who has first written their name, and even if there is no name they still somehow belong to some other person. I plan to write in Michael’s books. I shall write ‘from the library of Michal Byrne’. I know he’d like that.

Rant

Prepare yourself. I'm in the mood to rant, or moan... or possibly just whine. I'm feeling sorry for myself, so if you're not prepared to sympathise, stop reading now.

The thing is, I can't settle to reading anything much. My brain just seems to skate across the surface. I take in the words, I know what's going on, sometimes I even appreciate the way something's written, but I'm not engaged with the story and I'm not rushing back to the book as soon as I have a moment.

It's probably the 'as soon as I have a moment' that's the problem. Just now I have too much to do and too much to think about. Every bit of my time seems to scheduled for something and when I'm doing one thing I'm planning something else. The only reason I'm finding time to so this is because I'm forced to be idle at this precise moment because I'm waiting for a customer. I would read now, if I could, but I have to keep alert for the moment someone comes through the door, so I wouldn't be able to lose myself thoroughly in a book.

I have read a couple of things in the past month, but neither of them required any degree of focus from me, one being chicklit and the other a novel for teenagers.

This has been going on a while. I though my challenge of last year to read only authors who were new to me would hep, but if anything it made it worse. The only book I can think of in the past six months that has grabbed me and satisfied me is Emma Donoghue's Room. No, that's not true The Crimson Petal and the White was fabulous, but since I read it just after watching the TV series I think the effect was dulled.

I crave that feeling of surrendering myself to the story, blocking out the world around, complete focus on the words. But I'm too distracted, and even when I'm idle, the cup of coffee time, and the last thing at night time, the distraction follows me and I find myself doing the crossword or looking at catalogues. It's as though because I have so many different things to think about most of the time, my brain won't stop juggling the thoughts instead of smothering all the irrelevancies and letting the book take over.

What's the answer? Probably it's just to wait until I have less to think about. At least I can still read. When I first had Elspeth, I was absolutely unable to read for about three months. I suppose I must have felt I had to pay attention to her fully all the time. Plus, of course, I was waking up several times in the night , which wasn't helping the state of my mind. One day, I picked up The Horse Whisperer and read it just about as quickly as it is possible to read, crowding great chunks intomy brain like that really hot cup of tea when you're exhausted and cold. What a relief! It was all going to be OK. I could still read. True, the The Horse Whisperer is hardly Dickens or Dostoyevsky, not even Angela Carter or Ian McEwan, but it was a whole wonderful, absorbing book.

Occasionally, I doubt my capacity to become engaged in this way any more. I watch the children, lost in a book within moments of picking it up and I think 'I was like that. Why can't I do it now?' Jut imagine if I could never engage with a book again. Probably all I need is a holiday. Or four or five fewer jobs.

American interlude

I've just read a book that I bought twenty-four years ago and had yet to read. I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel in my only new authors campaign, so rummaged through the boxes in the attic in search of something as yet unread that I could take on holiday with me. Why though do I have books that have sat so long unread? Why did I buy them in the first place if I did not have the urge to read them? I know that years ago, when I had few books, and probably more children's books than adult ones (though maybe that's still the case?) I bought books by the handful whenever I found them for good prices. In the days of the Net Book Agreement, this generally meant secondhand or from a remaindered bookshop, though I also picked up a fair few with my 33% discount in my student bookshop job. I was also, am also, addicted to souvenir book-buying, that is, buying things that are relevant to my travels, a book by a Canadian author when in Canada, Asterix in French when in France. The book I've just read, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon comes somewhere in between the avid cheap book collecting and the souvenir hunting. Let me tell you.

When I finished my degree in 1987, I went to Boston to work in the bookshop at the University of Massachusetts (UMASS). The bookshop set-up was unlike anything I'd ever come across. In a huge shop that resembled a supermarket more than a bookshop, textbooks and set books new and secondhand (used) were set out in vast piles in supermarket-type aisles, each pile labelled with the course it was meant for, with a label reading 'Biology 101', 'Poli Sci 201' and so on. There'd be crisp new copies but also piles of used ones, many times used, for the courses with lower numbers, the basic courses, because I think with most US university courses one is expected to take a number of different subjects just like at school to start with and then only specialise later. Students would then just head for the right piles of books and purchase the entire reading list. I suppose this is a perfectly sensible way of going about this, something to be emulated by Dillons and Foyles in London, but I found the whole thing staggeringly foreign. Along with the bunch of other UK staff, a couple of Germans and a handful of locals I was assigned to unpacking boxes, stacking and restacking shelves, and manning the tills. There was a peak of activity at the beginning of the term, then things eased off and the foreigners began began to leave. Except me. I'd managed to make myself invaluable to the undermanager and although my working visa had run out, I discovered that as long as one was in the process of appealing, one could carry on working. I wasn't planning to stay forever, but had nothing special to get back for. So I stayed another three months until Christmas, when a polite letter from US Immigation told me that I was not necessary to the country so would I please go away.

In the meantime I continued to work at the UMASS Bookstore, no longer stacking shelves so much, but generally on the phone to someone with an impenetrable accent proccessing returns. But I had plenty of time to look at the books still set out on the shelves (not everyone bought them all in the first weeks). Most fascinating I found the literature courses, full of authors I'd never heard of, or heard of but not actually come across, and grouped into courses in ways I didn't understand. I was intrigued by these connections and these books, so most weeks I'd buy one or two. I can't recall these connections any more, so I'm frustrated by not remembering what group of books The Crying of Lot 49 fitted into, particularly since it was so difficult and unsatisfying a read. It makes me think of Kurt Vonnegut, the fantastic looped into the mundane, following a path than makes less and less realistic sense, but with Vonnegut I follow wherever he leads and know where I am and where I've come from, whereas with this I was all at sea almost from the start. Oh well, so it goes. It's a pretty souvenir of an interesting time anyway. And rather extraordinary to pick up a book so yellowed at the edges and yet so stiffly new.

Moby Dick Kindled

My sister-in-law never leaves home without a book, not ever. Family legend has it that she even had one stowed about her person when canoeing down the Zambezi, and found time for a few minutes reading respite when climbing Uluru. After all, you never know when the opportunity to read may occur. So I suppose after an interval of two years since I last saw her, I should not have been surprised to see her pulling a Kindle from her handbag instead of a dog-eared paperback. Nothing is more portable, and she had been travelling for the best part of a month before I saw her. What better way to carry a bibliophile's supply of reading matter rather than having to rely on whatever turns up along the way? Odd then, how I felt she'd sold out somehow.

I've only recently experimented with the Kindle myself. I thought I should attempt to embrace it, because obviously it's got plenty going for it: portability, price of books, less physical waste in terms of books you don't want to keep once you've read them once. So, I read Moby Dick, which had been on my 'to do' list for years. Perhaps it wasn't the best choice. It's fascinating and strange and rather wonderful, but also hard work, necessitating a bit of page-counting (see earlier blog for this phenomenon). Perhaps a thrill-a-minute page-turner (ha!) would have been a more satisfying first experience, allowing me to forget the medium.

One thing that had puzzled me was how you know how far on in the book you'd got without reference to the chunk of pages to the left of the page you are on versus the chunk of pages to the right. Here, the percentage read bar at the bottom of the Kindle page proved an equally good, or perhaps even better, visual indicator.

Turning the pages was a little frustrating. It seems logical to me to have a back button on the left of the page and a forward button of the right, but in fact both sides of the Kindle have both, so that I frequently pressed the wrong one and went back instead of forwards. On the other hand, the loading of each new page as you turned them was quicker and less intrusive than I'd feared, feeling much like the wordless moment you get in the turning of a physical page.

I was reading a free version of Moby Dick, and it is the only Kindle book I've ever read, so I don't know if others are more sophisticated in terms of layout. With this one, an asterisk next to a word denoted a footnote, and then the footnote appeared in the next paragraph, which started with an asterisk but was otherwise identical to the rest of the text. As this was not necessarily the bottom of the page, subsequent paragraphs reverted to main text, with no kind of separation between note and text, which I found rather confusing. The glossary too, was rather inadequate, containing few of the words I wanted to look up.

As to the physical object itself, I found it less easy to hold than I'd expected to. Of course, it is less cumbersome than a thick book, but I didn't find a way to hold it than was as easy as resting your thumb inside a paperback with the rest of your hand around the back. It was too flat to be really comfortable to hold, and I had to be careful not to press the forward and back buttons by mistake.

All these are niggles I suppose, things that would disappear with practice. I will try it again. I do see the point. If Camilla can fall for the Kindle, I expect I could get used to it. But you know, don't you, I don't even have to say it: it's not the same as a real book.