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.