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.

Netless Weekend

My my my my my. I have been chin deep in poetry and work lately. Here I am on last weekend.

We had no internet at all on Friday nor Saturday. Our database program works fine without it, except that any information we change or add will not carry over to the internet space where all that information is stored, so it's pointless to do anything involving new books.

Friday featured a bit of organization, but mostly it was just being there and reading some of the books hanging around. Everyone except Stellan (he usually stays a bit later) quit early, and the majority went to a little bar down the street. I was going to be staying in the city for the evening, because Academic Computing was having a party in the city, so I tagged along with Mike, Katherine, Krista and Jennifer. It was good to experience my fellow workers in a bar, even though it is already comfortably laid-back at work. Katherine is certainly a very talkative person, and is good to converse with. She brings up points to keep the thought evolving. She helped me decide to look at bewilderment, a craft of poetry that I had studied for a week back in Matthea's class last year. I think Stevens and bewilderment are connected, though perhaps not commonly closely. If you have any thoughts, please share.

Saturday would have been an entire day of sitting around with nothing to do (enjoying the company of course), except that there was a children's event (Mike is the children's event coordinator) scheduled today. We all went to a wonderful library two blocks east. I forgot to mention, we had a visitor who is a personal sponsor and supporter of Poets House, Annie Wright, wife of the late poet James Wright. I was not familiar with the name but I feel rather reluctant to bring up something like that with the wife; I have looked into his poetry and may take one of his books out for Spring Break.

It was really nice to have Annie there to talk to. She has been through a good deal of history in the New York scene and she had some great stories about friends of her husband: Robert Bly, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke. She was here I think to help with the children's event, though in this situation she really just came for support. One of today's emerging young reader poets, Bobbi Katz (she signs her last name with a cat), was to read this time. I met her and she was a very cheery woman.

This is where it gets hectic. After meeting, and then walking around the Japanese section of the library, Mike sent me on an errand to get a large pad of newsprint and some markers. Ok, Staples wasn't too far down the street. It was raining but I had to make good time (within the half hour) so I ran. Staples didn't have anything bigger than construction paper, so I rushed off down the street to a place the salesperson mentioned on Canal. Canal isn't too far either (maybe 3 blocks diagonally), but it set me even farther from the library, and the weather was not very kind, big gusts of wind too.

I made it to Canal and found the place. Pearl Paint. Not knowing a thing about it previously, I was blown away. 7 stories of art supplies. It's too bad I was in such a hurry. the staircase was old, the people were casual and friendly. I'm not even into art, but this place was a ball. Not so helpful if you're in a hurry though.

I made it back with the supplies (I even got a student discount). Bobbi was very grateful and when she came to use the print to brainstorm poems with the kids, she dedicated "My Special Friend" to me!

Unfortunately, the majority of the kids in the library were not attended by adults, and thus were more often playing video games than interested in the reader. By no means was I surprised by that, although I was disappointed to see the lack of parent input and accompaniment. There were a few kids with both mother and father spending a long time in the library that day, and they helped create a stark juxtaposition to those who were spending hours playing little pokémon style battle-based video games.

A Late Entry

Saturdays at Poets House are nice. There's that end of the week mentality coupled with the simple fact that since it's the end of the week, there isn't much left to do anyway. Running out of books to process, we all took our time today. It was Carlin, Stellan, Renni, and Izzy and me. I just met Izzy. She's been working there for a while, but she works on Saturdays, so I missed her my first Saturday, and she was sick last Saturday.

Stellan was not there when I came in, so I got straight to work on processing books as he'd taught me how yesterday. Mike and Katherine have been wanting me to bring in my own music, so I brought some today. We had a music fest. Everybody played a little bit. I'm going to make sure my Feel Good Lost - Broken Social Scene album gets regular play. It's great for working to.

I spent a lot of time today doing what I had been told was the main bonus of the internship, reading while I work. We get tons of really interesting books in each week from the last year (and some brand spankin' new '08 releases), and it's hard to just process and pass on to the next. Besides, we're running low on work anyway. Mike said if we ever want to borrow a book, since after all the place is a library, just make a note of it or let him know. I brought home two books.

your whole life - Douglas Goetsch
Much to my surprise, the picture on the back of the author was taken by Laure-Anne! I wonder if she could ever guess that her name on a photo credit would sell me on a writer. I didn't know you were a camera whiz. Well if they know each other, that's enough for me to bring the book home. It's a short book, a publication awarded him by Slipstream. It's an anual thing. However, it seems this guy has been writing for a while. He's got a handful of books out, a couple catching the eye of Billy Collins. Their writing style is similar. Goetsch's poems focus mostly on childhood perception; even in poems where adults are featured there is a hint that how society acts is no less childish (for better or worse) than it is on the playground of one of his poems:

Recess

A ring of children seated Indian style,
  a girl deciding which head to tap
    as she orbits them in her pretty dress

saying duck duck duck duck duck.
  Every boy wants to be the goose,
    to bolt up and run down this girl

before she makes it around
  to the spot he vacated. Once
    they saw her and fall, exposing

a lovely backside covered in lace.
  Maybe that is why their heads rise
    like charmed snakes as she passes

saying duck duck duck duck duck,
  annoying the girls in the circle, who frown,
    and attracting now the attention

of their teacher, leaving against a tree,
  bringing her gaze down from the clouds
    where she had been pondering two men—

the one she recently broke up with
  filling her with regret about the much
    better, more beautiful one from college.

Now she is twenty-nine, on perhaps
  the last warm day of September,
    the smartest, prettiest girl in the class

is going duck duck duck duck duck
  in an endless left hand turn,
    and she can’t figure out whether

the girl is powerful or helpless,
  as she blinks back tears and blows
    the whistle to end this.

The second book I grabbed, which I haven't had the chance to scan through is The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry. I'm excited to read some of the essays printed here. They always have such a good selection. I hope to find something that will help me with my conference work for my Stevens class. A quick leaf through has me in hopes of being able to use at the very least a "reception" from the back of the book called "Modernist poetry and the cannon." For those that don't know, I'm looking (in a broad sense currently) at the history of poetry between the books of Stevens and today. I want to look objectively at what's been happening in poetry on the grand scale to see if I can identify what exactly the Modernist movement of Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and Stevens did to shape the poetry of today. Any suggestions, let me know.

I'll be posting sometimes during the week, since now I have a bit more to say about various things. Stay tuned.

Eventful Friday (Saturday to come)

If you've been checking in daily, eager to get the scoop on what's happening at Poets House (chances are you haven't been...and perhaps shouldn't be) you'll notice I didn't post last night. Allow me to give a summary of yesterday.

I went in early today because Jeffrey McDaniel, my poetry workshop professor, scheduled a reading with Cate Marvin at Sarah Lawrence College at 7:30, and I wanted to leave early to make it back with enough time to see her. We read Marvin last week and went over her newer book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen (Gallaher's take). With gentle admiration I call her today's bitch poet. In tone, she's always either dangerous or ironic, or both, and her provocative dialogue explodes with animated, raw attitude. More on her later.

I went into the city about two hours early and headed first to scan the area nearby for a Thai food restraunt my suitemate, Taylor, told me about. Taylor, works at a low-key publisher a few streets west of Poets House's offices. As I headed down Houston looking for the street I thought the restraunt was on, I ended up walking into Taylor on his way to find some pizza for lunch. He showed me the way to this place (called Peep) and decided to abandon pizza for the Thai. The lunch menu is a very affordable (for Manhattan) $7 for an appetizer and main dish. Really good Pad Thai.

At Poets House I got orders to start using the database system. Stellan showed me how, and he was successfully lucid and concise in his explanation as he tends to be. One glance at the layout told me it was going to be easy. Previously I'd had an uncertainty about my ability to "do" database management. It was all wasted worry. I spent the time searching the database for titles, entering them in, and recording their identifications and statuses, something I was doing with ease for just under two years at the Orleans Whole Food Store on the Cape. I guess my fear of databases originated from the ambiguity of what a database can be. Emily at Academic Computing said basically there's some really complicated, but important theory on how a database works. Thus the creation of a database must be a bloomin' headache. But by no means was that what I was looking at. When a company mentions to you that you'll be working on database management, they really mean you'll have to read a bunch of data and then fill in the blanks on a survey so to speak, it's all very user-friendly.
Still, easy as it was to grasp, the process was not a breeze. Some books have translators and editors instead of authors, which have to be entered on a separate survey. Publishers (this I talked about earlier) sometimes have series names which will often confuse the situation. Then there are a slew of other confusing items that are just to be set aside and dealt with when Mike is around for that executive decision. The process is slow, and precision is key. After a book has been entered, it also needs a sticker that says it's in our showcase, and any extras (most of the time a publisher will send one extra copy) are to be marked duplicate. The duplicates are sold to raise money for various events the House hosts.
Though the process takes a while, considering there are a number of helpers every week, the job is completed pretty quickly. Stellan was staring at the four shelves of books yet to be managed saying: "man, we're gonna run out of work." We almost did even today. Next week is a new week though, and Mikes desk is apparently continually stacked with mailers on weekdays.

I worked on two mere stacks on Friday. The job felt somewhat unsatisfying when I looked at my 5 hours of work. But Katherine and Stellan assured that my work was bountiful. Wanting to finish shelving the books I managed, I left a few minutes late, so I hurried to Grand Central. Long story short I made it back right on time.

Only one other person from my class, Lindsey, showed up to meet Cate at the Pub before her reading. I think the Pub is a disgusting place. The food is horrible and expensive as well, but Cate didn't seem to mind. Lindsey was excited speechless with a question now and then to fuel Cate's unique behavior. I listened mostly, also interested, but lacking inspiration or useful inquiry. After all, I only gave the book a 4 (of 5) against Lindsey's 5.
Cate had a good deal to say about confessional poetry and the treatment it's been given over the years. I got some advice on my conference project. She sent me to some resources, including the letters of Wallace Stevens, to get a feel for what exactly propagated Stevensian language. We headed over to the reading room and she read for about half-an-hour, and we discussed a couple of her poems in depth. My favorite poem of hers (and I'm guessing one of her favorites as well based on her treatment of it) is Muckraker. The poem also features an epigraph from the famous sonneteer Sir Thomas Wyatt about whom I had the opportunity to study last year. Wyatt's a perfect specimen of pre-"confessional" confessional poetry.

By the time we left the reading area, it was pretty late and I headed home and got ready for sleep shortly after. It's getting late even tonight, so I'll make a short post about the goings-on today, tomorrow. I have some pictures I've been meaning to figure out how to post. So, starting tomorrow, there may be some color to this boring ramble I keep spewing.