Pics of the cleanup (Monday)

an artistic shot of the empty bookcases. we did the job in less than an hour.

these are the boxes we put them in. stages:
1. tape boxes | 2. spread boxes around room | 3. place applicable books in each box based on number and range written on side | 4. put book stands on top | 5. cover with paper | 6. tape boxes closed | 7. stack near exit | 8. load up our helper's van (with 5 people lugging, it took less than 5 minutes)

one of the more popular books in the showcase.

So now these boxes are sitting in the only space Poets House has for storage, the middle of the office. They'll be packed up in different boxes and sent off, since the storage people charge for boxes based on the size difference between the ones you give them and the ones they recommend.
For the next two weeks, I won't be seeing Poets House much. This coming weekend is Poetry Festival time at SLC. I'll be sure to talk a little about that too if I can. I'll go in on Friday for a couple hours. Next week I will also be going in on Friday, and leaving after to spend the weekend with Anna.

A Full Recount: Showcase is packing up

Ok, so last Saturday, the numbers were good, better than some previous years I was told, but unfortunately I didn't get any pictures on my own camera of the mobs. I was introducing people at the door and getting them to know the exhibit. A number of people were the authors and publishers looking specifically to see if their book(s) made it to the shelf. With only a couple mishaps, the day was a success. Here's a (blurry) picture of the higher-ups standing at the tables before opening.
The one farthest to the right is Lee, and next to her, Michael. You can also see some platters in the foreground, fruit and cheese. We had 6 total and used up 5. I brought the remaining one home to the ravenous college campus dwellers. There's still cheese in my fridge.

This weekend I got a better chance to relax and read some of the material. I began with Rachael Zucker's book, which I was to read this week anyway for my class. I found her at first to be fragmentary, banal at times, blinded, and blunt. As I moved through the book, I gained more of a grasp of what the point was. The last section, the Autographies, basically mock everything you might notice about the book previously, with sentences like (and I paraphrase), are you, reader, trying to figure out if I cheated on my husband?, why did I choose to relate the womb to a tree in the poem on page x?, sometimes my metaphors are gruesome, oh well. This self-mockery does make valid the rest of the book and the intentions Zucker had for its form and accessibility, but in doing so, it almost seems like an exhaustive disclaimer, though worded really well. As such, these poems ended up being the best, least scathing or cliché pieces of the book.

The other big piece of news is: Lux's new book is out! I spent all Saturday (when I found it on the shelf under Houghton Mifflin) reading and absorbing selections from the latest in the best. I just have to share:

Apology to My Neighbors for Beheading Their Duck

First, it was an accident: I did not mean
to sever his head. A book, or a being superior
or Superior, did not command it thus.
He'd gotten into the little yard we share.
He stood as still as if he were made of cement,
which, in fact, he was. Nevertheless, he was not meant
to lose his head. So that I could lop it off,
a text was not interpreted, though he was
a heterodux duck-- he wore a little blue hat.
This color is proscribed for a duck's hat.
Otherwise: white duck, orange feet and beak.
A decent duck, a cause-no-trouble duck.
He weighed a hundred pounds, weighted down
your car to get him here to his new home.
Without his head, he weighs five pounds less.
Without his head, broken at the neck,
he's a less impressive duck,
but still I had no right to take it.
It belonged to him,
and he needed it, his head,
as we, as all creatures, do,
despite the swamp, the sump, thriving inside it.
He did not belong to me,
nor was he of my family.
When I dropped a bag (rather than carry it
down to the barrels beside the duck) of trash
from my fourth-floor back porch,
that's what did it, clipped it clean off,
for which I offer apologies and cash,
but I must reiterate: a book
did not tell me I had the right to do so,
nor did I hear a voice,
a promise, from a pearly place.
I did it dumb and owe you fifty bucks!

Showcase!

Jefferson Market Library - 6th Ave. & 9th Street (that was easier than I thought)

My poets house weekend began on Thursday this time. The calendar went like so:

Thursday:
- Mike brings boxes of books to the library in his car
- We spread the books throughout the 27 or so bookcases
- Pizza on Poets House! (huge slices too)
- We choose a handful of books from each shelf that are vibrant or beautiful to display face out
- One more checklist round to check on publishers. Mike prints out any publisher labels we don't yet have.

Friday:
- Pub(lisher) labels are hung
- The area is beautified and catalogs are delivered
- I run a few errands: a. hardware store for shelf support pins, b. staples for mail label stickers, c. poets house for material we forgot, d. another hardware store, because the shelf pins i got at the first didn't fit.
- Sandwiches on Poets House! I order a pastrami and muenster with mayo (Stone at first thought the idea was crazy, mayo with red meat?? I guess it's a new york thing).
- a few more books that were in the "deathly confusing" pile are sorted and shelved.

Here are some pictures of the inside. I was told this space is about half as big as they usually get to work with. I am horrible at taking pictures, so the one's without the flash I apologize for.

Left: Publishers 217 Records - Graywolf. Picture taken from the door.

Right: Closeup on BOA and others on the second shelf. See Laure-Anne's book!












Left: Closeup of the shelf tags. Some shelves had none or one, some had tags all across the shelf. The trouble with these buggers is the plastic cases they're in fit thicker shelves, so whenever someone pulled out a book, there was a risk of dropping the tag (which would happen a lot on Saturday. We had specific trouble with the ones on the bottom-most shelf, and we decided to just tape those ones. Note: Copper Canyon press at the beginning of this shelf continues from the previous; they are a medium-to-large-sized press.


Right: Shelf pulled out to open and close the window. It got hot in this room. This is around the M-P range. The green one in the lower left is Ani Difranco's new book. The small white on the top shelf in the middle is Neruda's love poems.

Left: Pudding House - University of Oklahoma (and on the extreme left is Z, the stacks of catalogs and foreign published books).










I'll make a post a bit later with more pictures and my recounting of Saturday!

Visiting William Blake

Saturday is quiet even today, the last day of the week before Showcase week. I guess that just means we're on schedule. My next day with Poets House will be this coming Thursday. Mike and a brawny, reliable helper will be transporting books from Broadway to the library in Mike's car. By the time I get there, they'll have already done their routes and the assistants will be at work setting things up. Mike told us to bring some friends, so I've invited a couple, but I haven't heard a definite from anyone. Thursday's a weekday and thus falls prey to scheduling conflicts.

After a little persistence from Renni, we got the opportunity to join Annie Wright and Mike for the monthly children's event at the Mulberry Street Library. This month our guest is Nancy Willard, a professor of English at Vassar, came to read a few of her poems for the kids. She is most recently, largely a writer of poetry for children, but some of her earlier books are for an older crowd. She came with her husband and a bag full of exciting puppets and props she has received or crafted to use as talk pieces and objects to get the kids' attentions. She read from a great little book starring William Blake.

Only two kids showed up, but after she began, about seven more kids joined in. Many of the kids couldn't sit still and opted instead to play quiet games with the little cylindrical seat cushions they were given to sit on. When Willard started the interactive poem, the kids settled down and got to thinking. Willard's poem was a "what if..." poem: what if you were given a house for free, but the catch was that you had to stay for the night in the house and the house was full of many scary things. Some of the children just went crazy raising their hands at anything they could come up with: the bed walks away when you try to get in, the whole house is pitch black, your teddy bear talks. Willard was so successful at getting them involved; I am truly impressed. Sometime this week I will pick out one of her poems to place here.

Showtime!

Showcase Sieves

Friday featured an interesting shift. This weekend marks the last opportunity to polish the preparations for moving the showcase books. Everything has to be in neat and correct order.

There were four of us, so we had, as Mike called it, team alpha start at one end of the alphabet and team bravo start at the other. Who knows which was which, but Mike and I began at Z, and Emily (a long-time assistant) and Emily (just started yesterday) began at # (which comes before A). Mike and Emily held a printed catalog of the database as it stands now and me and...the other Emily read titles that were on the shelf until there was a discrepancy.

There were many discrepancies. The problem is that once one mistake is made, others will make a contingent mistake (for example: if I put a book from Pleiades Press before Penguin Books by mistake, then someone else might see my book and put another Penguin book before it, thus fueling more inevitable mistakes.

Today I talked to Stellan, whoose name I have finally realized as Stone, about Jorie Graham. I first encountered Graham's work in the tangled Overlord last year upon a dare to read and understand it. I suppose I didn't take the dare too seriously, and I only a bit, and it's tone suggested a few themes. Stone picked her new book Sea Change from the shelves last week and came back the next day half-done and loving the material. I'll have to get a copy of her book and see how she's evolved.

Enough for now, I'll report on today tomorrow =P

Sarcasm Rules

This weekend sarcasm has been a big part of my Poets House experience. I don't mean I've been using it myself, or that any of it has been directed at me, but it's certainly there and only as a tool for creating interesting bonds between employees. Sarcasm in the workplace is one of those things one would normally need to watch out for. It's unprofessional and likely suggestive of one's negative disposition to respond in a matter-of-fact, deceptively ignorant, or belittling manner, and sometimes it's dangerous to even use one of these tones sincerely. But some workplaces contain business relationships that have the opportunity to reach a level of sarcasm that, if played well, can make the workday more exciting and comfortable.
I think this weekend featured a good deal of that atmosphere. I don't know that I'd have minded much either if it were present or not, but it being a focus in our community, I have no problem embracing its comic benefits.

Showcase month is a couple days away, it's getting busy. We're running out of space on our shelves, about 90% of the books requested have passed through our doors now and we expect around another couple hundred in the coming weeks to level our usual average of two thousand (and change) books. A number of volunteers and interns have been working hard. We were able to iunput 111 books on Saturday, between Izzy, Reny, me, and Mike and Stellan who only occasionally input a few books. Put that way it doesn't seem like much, but then there are many steps to the input procedure and then there's shelving.
Mike took us three interns aside to look at some of the books we entered on Saturday to see how we were doing and to give us the formal opportunity to ask questions. I was glad to have this chance, since I had a number of questions about the system that I just felt would be random and pointless if just asked at any time. The more difficult books to enter are: the books in translation or those written in other languages, books with multiple editors, or complicated author systems, and sometimes anthologies.
Our information is being entered into an online database! So, it's imperative that we enter things in streamlined fashion.

See ya next week!

Spring Break and Cake

It's been a while since I wrote here. What with Spring Break in the now and lots of cake to eat, I haven't had much time for it. But I shall give a short update.

Poets House:

On the 14th and 15th I went in to work, the two days following my birthday on the 13th. Katherine remembered my birthday via the Ides. It was pretty much a normal day on Friday, and Saturday was also a bit more of the same, but quieter. There were a few highlights.

I pulled some books from the "save for later, 'cause they're strange" pile. Previously I thought it would be difficult to enter thee books into the database due to their lack of standard formatting. It probably would have been difficult, but now I am really comfortable with the system, and now I know my way around a book and all the tips and tricks to finding hidden information. Still, not many books had much to grasp as far as universal classification. Today a book published by a fully-established press has three identification numbers:

library of congress control number: 2005018280 (notice the date at the beginning)
universal call number: PZ7.O81167Nhu 2006 (this date is the copyright date)
Dewey decimal number: [Fic]--dc22 (the ID in brackets is a substitution for a number, in this case, 813)
Check out this website for a listing of dewey decimal roots: http://www.tnrdlib.bc.ca/dewey.html#800

Most books of poetry have similarly formatted numbers. Our Dewey numbers go something like: 811'.6--dc22, and for call numbers: PS3665.S68 T6 2007. These crazy pieces, some of them self-published, some published by smaller presses, some whose publishers don't care for or necessarily need that sort of information, often don't even have a publisher's page. What's even more esoteric is that most also were not by any means traditional books of poetry. This only made them more interesting.

I began leafing through one book to find that it was just a bunch of lines running every which way all about a dozen pages. I thought at first to have picked up a book of art (which we get sometimes), but Michael assured me it was poetry. Visual poetry. Aside from the initial thought of how ridiculous the notion of calling squiggly lines poetry--but when you think about it, letters are a bunch of symbols too--I was intrigued and confused. Michael's personal take on the form is that the artist means to convey feeling just as any poet, and through these series of intentionally directed lines, the reader is to create a more abstract poem, a wordless one. As it happens I've been thinking about visual poetry, although not to such an extreme, and I have also been thinking about how a poem looks on the page affects the reader's reaction.

At the end of the day, near to the end of my shift, we all congregated at the stack of boxes that have been sitting in the middle of the main office area. I learned earlier that the books were a donation from a college professor who left the poetry to Poets House by will. There were many boxes; Mike guessed that her whole house must have been shelves of books. There were a great deal of well-kept hardcovers and publications, donations Poets House really appreciates. Our job was to take them out of the boxes they were in and to put them into the only kind of boxes the storage area in New Jersey would accept. Looking through the boxes was really exciting. I got to see a few books I had always heard about, some I bought for classes...it was like having a chunk of the old Poets House in our offices.

I'm halfway through my vacation, no work Easter weekend. I'll be sure to make a faster update next time.