I Never Trust an East Wind

Strange sky on Sunday morning

The weather forecast for Sunday morning was for a couple hours of rain or snow, but the east wind was a monkey wrench thrown in that prediction. No way we would have rain, with air as cold as it was, the little no-name creek frozen to silence again except for the miniature waterfall section. Sunrise had no warmth to it, either. Were those grey clouds in the north moving our way? No, they seemed at a standstill, sun and wind pouring between two completely different sets of clouds. But then, an east wind always makes for strange weather.

 

Now it’s spring break. – Not for me, but for many. Northport School is closed. New Bohemian Café is closed all week, too, as are Fischer’s Happy Hour Tavern, 9 Bean Rows, and heaven knows how many other purveyors of food and coffee, so those of us staying behind in Leelanau will have to be resourceful to get through the remainder of March. Don’t we always, though? One way or another….

 

Several people have asked if I found it worthwhile to have the bookstore open all winter. Since it wasn’t my first bookstore winter, I knew what to expect, and that did not involve crowds of book buyers carrying out piles of treasures! A few bibliophiles now and then were grateful, however, to find the shop open, and several large inventory intakes kept me busy pricing and shelving and rearranging whole subject areas, which means I’ll be well stocked when “the season” arrives.

Young people on left, classics on right

Older children's books, YA, and school readers

Then, too, I’ve been keeping my weeks and days short: Wed.-Sat., 11-3. It only makes sense. Projects at home, not to mention work and play with Sunny Juliet (mostly play), are more important than looking out at empty downtown streets until 5 p.m.

Now, though, Northport is moving toward establishing a “social district,” which is apparently (and I didn’t know this before) a term for official sanction to take alcoholic beverages from restaurants and bars out onto the sidewalk and into the parks. I haven’t taken a position pro or con on the plan and won’t be taking one, as younger generations are driving now. They’re putting in a lot of time and energy, and it’s their turn, while my business and I are Old School and will never be anything different, so I’ll just watch and report from the sidelines. 

And a week from now it will be time for me to post my “Books Read” for the month of March. Will I finish that very philosophical nonfiction book in time to include it, or will I continue to be pulled off-task by one novel after another, currently The Piano Tuner, by Daniel Mason. And will the piano tuner ever reach Burma? I’m beginning to wonder, and the only way to find out is to keep reading. (Juleen, I know you've already read the book, but don't tell me what happens!) Sunny Juliet had a bath this morning, so we will be spending the day indoors, and I should have time for quite a bit of reading, letting that strange east wind do what and as it will.

What a clean dog girl!

Closing note about one of those projects at home: A metal frame table with wood surface has been my “desk” in the office but in a few weeks will be put into service as a seedling nursery, and I’ll move desk work to the actual desk. The table, covered with Con-Tact paper in the past, seemed ready and willing to give up that covering, so with putty knife and fingers I started stripping it down. 

Looking a little shabby

Stripping it down....

Then the table’s identity suddenly came clear to me: It was the table from the houseboat! David’s homemade houseboat, moored for years on the Leland River, just upstream from the Riverside Inn. I got out photos, and yes, there it was. 

The same table

Houseboat and rowing skiff on the Leland River

So now even those discolored rings revealed on the surface are dear to me. Recover it? Paint it? don't think so. Like Harlan and Anna Hubbard, continuing their "shantyboat life" on the banks of the Ohio in their new house, I will keep my past close going into the future, whatever the future brings.

What Do You Need, Really Need?

Oxygen, right? Air to breathe. Water is a baseline requirement, as is sufficient food, and you can’t live without sleep.  I’m sure we can agree on those.

The way psychologist Abraham Maslow looked at human needs, only after the basics were covered would anyone worry about needing more.  Maslow’s notion of a hierarchy of needs has been questioned by critics, but most of us have noticed that we have a hard time concentrating when we’re too hungry; as much as the spirit may want to soar above the body, the body is not going to stop making demands.

Okay, then, what about love? Or do you prefer power? Then, security – or excitement? Challenge – or comfort?

The other day one of my regular customers, with a heartfelt sigh, asked the rhetorical question, “What do people do who don’t read books?” For her, as for me, books are among life’s necessities. If I had never learned to read or had had no access to books, I would never have traveled to medieval China, never met Helen Keller, never had a horse – and that very short list of experiences I would have missed without reading books could obviously be extended to book length itself.

But that’s not my object at present. I’m sneaking up on my real question in roundabout fashion. Do we need poetry in our lives? Here is one explanation for the affirmative, not necessarily the one I would give but an interesting perspective.

Did you read poetry back in grade school and high school? Only because you had to, or did it give you something other kinds of reading, as well as other kinds of experience, could not provide? Have you continued reading, maybe even writing poetry in your adult life?

Sometimes I think the reading of poetry, for busy grownups, is like lying in the grass on a summer’s day to watch clouds. It’s easy to forget from day to day about clouds and poetry as the days succeed each other with increasingly ferocious speed until one day, startled, we realize that years have gone by.

To read a poem first thing in the morning or last thing at night, like taking half an hour on a summer afternoon to watch clouds, is to give ourselves valuable personal time off from otherwise over-organized lives. And we can do it. We can give ourselves the time, calm our spirits, and enrich our lives, too, by freshening our senses and understanding with poetry. 

Note to those who “don’t understand” poetry: Turning reading into work is not necessarily the answer to enjoying poetry. Just as we don't need to analyze clouds to lose ourselves in watching them drift by (and everyone sees something different in the shifting shapes of clouds), so with poetry. Let the sounds and rhythms pour down on you like warm, gentle rain. Let images arise in your mind as they will. Perhaps one small phrase, three or four words, will resonate meaningfully, and that will be the poem’s gift to you. You do not owe it the ordeal of analysis.

Note to writers of prose: All of us who write anything have as much to learn from reading poetry as from reading fiction or history or memoir. My customer-friend quoted at the beginning of this post told me that one Michigan fiction writer, a person with some literary authority, has declared line breaks to be the only difference left between poetry and prose – what is done with the line, that is. Well, if he’s right, all the more reason for prose writers to make a practice of reading poetry, but to me there remains a second difference: to me, a poem is a distillation, in a way a book (fiction or nonfiction) or even an essay never can be.

In the best of poems, each word is essential, because the poem’s central thought or emotion or image has been refined to its essence, all extraneous language pared away. And so the exercise of writing a poem is excellent practice for any writer, and reading poetry something no writer can neglect. Stephen King, in his book On Writing, stressed the importance of reading other people’s books every day, and more recently, when asked in an interview what his readers would be surprised to find on his shelves, he mentioned books of poetry. Yes, I was surprised by that, but on second thought it made perfect sense. The most economical and thoughtful use of language can be found in the work of poets.

I know I need poetry, not (like air and water and food and sleep) for bare survival but in order to flourish. Sometimes I forget for a while how necessary it is to me, but having a bookstore gives me plenty of reminders, as do my poet friends.

My next bookstore guest will be Jennifer Clark from Kalamazoo on Wednesday, July 8. She will be at Dog Ears Books beginning at 3 p.m. to read from her collection of poems titled Necessary Clearings.

Here is the first stanza from “Snake Wife” (great title!):

Skin so tight now,

every breath, a chore.

She is not sure how she

stepped into this skin that

once glistened and grooved.

Where will the poem go next from this beginning? Don’t you long to know? Please join us on Wednesday!