Garrison Keillor Ruffles Some Feathers

Over at Norlight Lit Life, the blog of Northern Lights Bookstore, they take exception at a recent statement by cultural icon and fellow bookstore owner Garrison Keillor. They write, 'Oh Garrison, we love you but we hope you realize why people were justly upset with your comments of late. Comment one: Garrison Keillor commented that Common Good Books, St. Paul, Minn., which he opened in 2006, "is sort of slowly making its way. I don't know. It's not making money. Nobody makes money with bookstores."

It's the blanket of "nobody" that stands independent bookselling hair on end. It is certainly difficult to make money selling books. Living in 90% of the world today, you'll find difficulties making money in most businesses that don't revolve around oil, weapons, or governmental bailouts. This buys into the dangerous myth of the dying bookstore. Times are tough. Some great stores have closed their doors. Bookselling alone has brought few independent wealth. But to say that no one makes money on it, that we're non-profits without 501-c status rather than integral and innovative members of the business community — that's where we disagree. Most vociferously with the perpetuation of that myth that bookstores are a dead-end for business — the myth that big box stores and online warehouses would love to use as examples of us being quaint dinosaurs. The only way someone should mistake us for quaint dinosaurs is in hearing our roar combined with our impeccable customer service!'

This is an ongoing discussion in our office and elsewhere in the book world: is this popular story grounded in fact? Certainly, every business today is struggling — but does the closing of many bookstores indicate tough times or a pandemic demise? We'd love to hear what booksellers themselves have to say on this!

Summer Reading

Over at the Three Percent blog, Nobel Prize-winner Le Clézio's novel Desert is recommended summer reading from the 2010 Best Translated Book Award panelists (it has disclaimer that this is not in any way the award's long-list, but we hope Desert is included on that too). Chad Post writes, 'The list below simply represents all of the titles that the nine BTB panelists (Monica Carter, Scott Esposito, Susan Harris, Annie Janusch, Brandon Kennedy, Bill Marx, Michael Orthofer, Chad W. Post, and Jeff Waxman) have recommended to each other to take a look at. It’s a sort of list of “books in the running,” or more accurately, “translations that some of us have liked.” (And yes, this is just fiction. For now. Maybe we could do something with poetry in the not-too-distant future . . .)'

The Effort

It has been a blur of wild activity here over the past few weeks. We're calling independent bookstores to follow up on our catalog mailing, setting bookstore appointments for David (who is at ALA right now in Chicago and will be in Denver next week), finishing our Fall lead titles in production, and trying to come up with new marketing, sales, and publicity avenues all the while. The total expended effort to keep these projects afloat is just herculean.

From the editorial process to the minutiae of color proofing, to calling bookstores individually: every tiniest aspect of the organization requires personal, focused attention. Not a bit of it is automatic. If it were not that the staff here — from our interns to the owner — are better jugglers than Barnum Bailey, everything would fail miserably. Before working as such a small organization I had never realized how intensive the publishing process really is. David Godine acquires, edits, art directs, sets metal type, calls on bookstores, and works the trade shows. The editors do marketing, the publicity person edits, the art director does permissions, and the production guy (moi) controls the website. We also make julienne fries (it's a good thing) and whiten your smile.

All of this is apropos of nothing, but the blog has been pretty quiet and I thought our regular readers would want to know what's happening. I hope everyone else's summer is a little bit calmer!

That Joe Biden. . .

He sure has good taste! Here is a picture of Vice President Biden looking over a copy of Genius of Common Sense (via Genius author Glenna Lang).

Joe Biden and Genius of Common Sense

Vice President Joe Biden came to Boston to raise money at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser on June 23. Before he was set to speak, people mingled in a large space high above Fenway Park. My old friend from Cambridge politics, Rob Barber, who now heads the New England Steering Committee for Organizing for America and was to introduce the vice president, tipped me off that if I positioned myself “along the rope” keeping the audience about eight feet away from the speakers, I might have a good chance of being on Joe’s path while he greeted the crowd as he exited after his speech.

When I noticed folks starting to move towards the podium, I headed up there and saw that tall, mostly men in suits had already lined up along the rope. I turned to the woman next to me, who was several inches shorter than my 5’2”, and said, “What do we do?” It turned out her name was Magdalena and she had taken a ferry, a bus, and a train to get there from Martha’s Vineyard where she works as a nurse. She had volunteered in Obama’s campaign and was enthralled by the candidate and his running mate, to say the least.

When I asked one of the tall guys if Magdalena and I might stand in front of them, they graciously agreed. We all had a great conversation as we waited a long time for the program to start. And right before it did, an 11-year-old girl made it through the crowd behind me, and I pulled her in next to me. I now had the beautiful young girl in a salmon-colored chiffon dress on my right and Magdalena in her colorful garb from the Dominican Republic on my left, all of us along the rope in front of the lectern.

I can’t neglect to say what a terrific and charismatic speaker Joe Biden is. He hit all the right points about health care, the environment, end to nuclear proliferation, etc. This is not a time to prioritize, we must do everything at once. He mentioned Scranton a number of times, with a funny story that took place there to boot. The three of us, directly in front of him, were smiling and nodding. When he spoke about children and education, he paused to ask the girl next to me how old she was and wove her into his message.

Sure enough, after his speech, Biden stepped off the podium and headed along the rope. His second stop was Magdalena. She blurted out that she had always wanted a hug from Barack Obama. Joe Biden responded with a bear hug and a promise to deliver it to the president. I held up Genius of Common Sense with a post-it note on the cover saying “About someone else from SCRANTON.” I said, “I wrote this book about another very important person from Scranton.” The vice president widened his eyes, yanked the book from my hands, studied the cover, and said, “Jane Jacobs? No kidding!” I managed to get in “It’s for your grandchildren” before he exclaimed “THANK YOU” and planted a kiss firmly on my cheek!

Magdalena had asked a woman across the room to take some photos of us if we got to speak with Joe Biden. Not surprisingly, he was surrounded by secret service, so I am not sure if the photos will capture anything. She’ll email them to me if they do, but anyway, it was a thrill – and I hope he or his grandchildren read the book. I think they just might.

[The author of this post is Glenna Lang, co-author of Genius of Common Sense, as well as several other Godine titles.]

Bombus impatiens — Common Eastern Bumble Bee

The Common Eastern Bumble Bee is one of the most oft-encountered pollinators found working in the garden. I love to say the words Bombus impatiens (BOM-bus im-PAY-shuns); the round soft sounds of the genus and species names rolls around the lips and off the tongue. Bombus is Latin for ‘”booming” or “buzzing.” Of course, a babbity buzzing bumble bee must surely be a Bombus! The binomial nomenclature for the Spanish poppy in the photograph, Papaver atlanticum (pronounced pah-PAH-ver at-LAN-tik-um), too, is pleasurable to say aloud. Learning about the root meanings of these descriptively beautiful names and how to pronounce them is just one of the many joys of learning about the natural world.

Taxomic Classification of the Common Eastern Bumble Bee
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta (True Insects)
Order: Hymenoptera (Ants, Bees, Wasps, and Sawflies)
Family: Apidae (Bumble, Carpenter, Digger, Cuckoo, and Honey Bees)
Sub-family: Apinae (Honey, Bumble, and Digger Bees)
Genus: Bombus (Bumble Bees)
Species: impatiens


Bombus impatiens ranges across eastern North America from Ontario to Maine and south to Florida. It is more commonly found along the Atlantic coast and is much less common near the western edge of its range (eastern North Dakota, western Kansas, and eastern Texas).

Comparing it to last month’s photo of the Carpenter Bee, which is characterized by a shiny black abdomen, the first abdominal section of the Common Eastern Bumble Bee is covered with yellow pile and the remaining segments with black pile. Members of the genus Bombus are generally covered in aposematically-colored pile, meaning long hairs in “warning” colors of black and yellow.

As do their relatives the carpenter bee and honey bee, bumble bees form colonies, feed on nectar, build nests, and gather pollen to feed their young. Bombus impatiens typically nests below ground in preexisting holes, often using discarded rodent nests.

Unlike a honey bee’s stinger, which is barbed, the bumble bee’s stinger is smooth and can be used over and over again. Usually, bumble bees present very little danger as they are typically non-aggressive and would rather not expend their energy manufacturing venom unless absolutely necessary. The loud buzzing sound bumble bees make is the result of vibrating its flight muscles, which it must do to warm up to become airborne at low ambient temperatures.

Pollination by bees is known as melittophily. Many bee pollinated-flowers are blue or yellow, often with ultraviolet nectar guides, and are scented. Bee-pollinated flowers fall into several categories: open, bowl-faced flowers such as wild roses and poppies, composite flowers (asters and goldenrod), and non-radial symmetric flowers such as lupines and turtlehead. Up to forty percent of the world’s food is pollinated by wild bees, including bumble bees. Because they are especially efficient pollinators Bombus impatiens is increasingly called upon in the agriculture of blueberries, cranberries, alfalfa, clover, and hot-house tomatoes. Cool, cloudy, and even light rainy weather may slow bumble bees, but activity will not be completely halted. Bumble bees can fly in temperatures to 41 degrees, whereas honey bees require temperatures at a minimum of 50 degrees.

The greatest threat to bumble bees is loss of adequate habitat. Monoculture farming has changed fields formerly rich in floral diversity. Bombus species need habitats continuously in bloom, from April to November. One solution is to create, between farm fields, buffer zones of wild flower meadows. Bombus impatiens has been recorded feeding on many flower families, including the following: Apiaceae (carrot), Asclepiadaceae (milkweeds), Asteraceae (composites), Balsaminaceae (Impatiens capensis), Berberidaceae (barberries), Convovulaceae (morning glories), Ericaceae (heaths), Fabaceae (legumes), Lamiaceae (mints), Malvaceae (mallows), Papaveraceae (poppies), Rosaceae (roses and allies), Saliaceae (willows), Saxifragaceae (saxifrages), Solanaceae (tomatoes), and Urticaceae (nettles).

Spanish poppy, also commonly called Moroccan and Atlantic poppy, is an utterly delightful perennial poppy that begins to flower in mid-spring in our garden, and, with consistent deadheading, continues unstintingly until the first frosts of autumn, providing nectar for three seasons. The lovely deeply lobed blue-green foliage begins to look a bit tired by mid-summer but then recovers with the cooler weather of late summer. Moroccan poppy blooms in one color only, a clear shade of Spanish orange. The flower takes a semi-double form “Flore Pleno,” but I (and the bees) prefer the single form. In reading up on Papaver atlanticum it is often recommended to weed out the ordinary and “less desirable” single forms, silly advice really. The singles are beautiful and less fussy-looking. P. atlanticum is found growing wild in rocky crevices in the mountains of Morocco, giving us a hint about their culture. They require good drainage (excellent for the rock garden) and grow well in full to light sun. When the seed capsules are allowed to mature, Moroccan poppy will reseed readily throughout the garden. Remove the unwanted seedlings, allowing others to take hold where they are desired. Transplant seedlings when they small, only a few inches in height, and early in the season, while the weather is still cool. Moroccan poppies resent transplanting and will not recover if attempted during the heat of summer.

End Notes: Save the dates for the Seaside Garden Tour sponsored by the Rockport Garden Club, Friday July 10 and Saturday July 11 from 10 am to 4 pm. Tickets are on sale at Toad Hall Bookstore. Tour includes perennial plant sale.

[Find more of Kim Smith's gardening and garden design tips in her book, Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities, available now from Godine and fine bookstores everywhere.]

P.K. Page at Poetry Magazine

A new poem from Godine author and acclaimed Canadian poet P.K. Page appears in the current issue of Poetry Magazine (June 2009), "Cullen in the Afterlife." If you enjoy this, we highly recommend Cosmologies, which was shortlisted for the 2003 Griffin Award for Excellence in Poetry, has a foreword from book critic Eric Ormsby, and is the first (still the only?) of the poet's collections to be published in the United States. For your reading pleasure, here is another poem from Page's Cosmologies,


"The Understatement"

I speak not in hyperbole,
I speak in true words muted to their undertone,
choosing a pebble where you would choose a stone,
projecting pebbles to immensity.

For where love is no word can be compounded
extravagant enough to frame the kiss
and so I use the under-emphasis,
the muted note, the less than purely rounded.

Perec at the NBCC

This is maybe one of the strongest recommendations I've seen of a Godine writer who has — to say the least — an enthusiastic fan base. Critical Mass, the NBCC blog, has been posting responses to the question, 'which work in translation had the deepest effect on their reading and writing?'

Martin Riker, of the estimable Dalkey Archive Press, writes, 'That would be one or all of Georges Perec’s novels. If I had to pick one, it would be Life A User’s Manual, unless it was W, or A Memory of Childhood. Although it might also be his early novel, Things. These are the translated titles, to which I resort because I don’t speak or read French. I once had the occasion to write to the translator of these books, David Bellos, and I took the opportunity to let him know that Perec is my favorite writer, and that, since a translator is to a large extent the creative force behind a translated work, he, David Bellos, is also, in a palpable way, my favorite writer. Few writers have opened up the possibilities of literary art with as much enthusiasm, mastery, and pleasure as Perec.'

Rosa bourboniana

Roses grow well in our Gloucester garden. The buds are reluctantly, yet deliberately, beginning to open in the cool dampness of this year’s early June weather. While coming and going along the garden pathway and up and down the front stairs, we are teased by their fleeting scent. I am impatient for their beauty and fragrance. The climbers and ramblers grow more massive, and ever taller still, and soon the garden, and the adjoining rooms to our home, will be infused with their pervasive perfume. The large-flowered redolent climbers ‘Aloha’ and ‘New Dawn,’ along with ‘Variegata di Bologna,’ clamber up the porch pillars. ‘Louise Odier’ and ‘Souvenir de Victor Landeau,’ both sumptuously scented Bourbon roses, are planted adjacent to these beauties, one on either side of the front steps. Around the corner is the rugosa hybrid ‘Therese Bugnet,’ with inherent beach rose fragrance, and opposite her is my mystery rose, climbing two stories tall, her aromatic Persian pink blossoms draped about our second story bedroom window. Sublime, really.

Because the roses are sited within close proximity to the house, along the garden paths and embowering the front entryway and windows, few pests or diseases escape my attentive eye. Eliminating the earliest Japanese beetles helps to control a mass onslaught. Removing, and carefully disposing of, leaves that show the first signs of black spot helps to retard the spread of the disease.

The following is an excerpt from Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities! For extensive information on rose culture and an expanded list of the most richly scented cultivars see Chapter 14 titled "Roses for the Intimate Garden."

Rosa bourboniana

The Bourbon roses (Rosa bourboniana) comprise one of the most extravagantly scented class of roses, along with having a wide range of growth habit in form and height. From the shrubby and compact ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison,’ growing to about two feet, to the thornless climbing ‘Zephirine Drouhin,’ there is a suitable Bourbon rose available to fill nearly every conceivable desired effect in the landscape.

Named for the island of Reunion, formerly called Isle de Bourbon, Rosa bourboniana is a natural crossing of the China rose (repeat blooming) with the Autumn Damask rose. Reunion belongs to the archipelago of Mascareignes in the Indian Ocean and lies east of Madagascar. Originally discovered by the Portuguese, then colonized by the French in the seventeenth-century, Reunion had a diverse population of settlers from around Africa, Asia, and southern Europe. The Bourbon rose was discovered growing wild in Reunion in approximately 1817.

Hybridized Bourbon roses flower in hues of white to china pink to cerise and purple. The flowers are quartered at the center and filled with overlapping petals. With their sublime fragrance, tolerance for cold temperatures, and freedom of flowering (‘Louise Odier’ remains in bloom from June until the first frost), Bourbons are amongst the most distinctive of all roses.

The following is a list of Bourbon roses successfully growing in our garden, along with one failure noted.

‘Louise Odier’ ~ 1851 ~ Bourbon ~ Delicate china pink, camellia-style flowers, enchanting and intensely fragrant. Blooms lavishly throughout the season, from early June to November, with a brief rest after the first flush of June flowers. Grows four to five feet.

‘Zéphirine Drouhin’ ~ 1868 ~ Bourbon ~ Clear hot pink. Thornless. The sensuous Bourbon fragrance is there, only not as intense relative to some others noted here. Repeat blooms. Twelve feet.

‘Madame Isaac Pereire’ ~ 1881 ~ Bourbon ~ Deep raspberry-magenta. Considered to be one of the most fragrant roses. Six to seven feet. Note: We no longer grow Madame Isaac Pereire as its buds usually turned into brown, blobby globs that rarely fully opened due to damp sea air.

‘Souvenir de Victor Landeau’ ~ 1890 ~ Bourbon ~ Deep rose pink, richly fragrant and consistently in bloom through October and into November. Pairs beautifully with Louise Odier. Four to five feet.

‘Variegata di Bologna’ ~ 1909 ~ Bourbon ~ Creamy pale pink with rose-red striations. Suffused with the heady Bourbon fragrance. The foliage becomes tattered-looking later in the season. Slight repeat bloom, although it initially flowers for an extended period of time, four to six weeks in all. Tall growing, best supported against a pillar.

‘Souvenir de Saint Anne’s’ ~ 1916 ~ Bourbon ~ Ivory flushed with warm pink and cream single to semi-double blossoms. Sensuous Bourbon fragrance. Compact growing, ideal for the garden room. Continually blooming. Two feet. Note: ‘Souvenir de St. Anne’ is a sport of ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ (1843), with the similar lovely colorway. The unopened buds and blooms of ‘Malmaison’ have the tendency to be ruined in damp air, whereas ‘St. Anne’s’ do not.

Several tips for improved rose culture:

Aphids are soft-bodied, winged and non-winged, gnat-sized insects found in a range of colors — bright green, reddish brown, orange, yellow, and black. They form colonies on the tender new growth tips of roses and will suck the moisture out of every flower bud. Vigilance is key. Simple and organic methods for controlling aphids include spraying the infested area vigorously with a garden hose set on a jet stream directed onto the infested new growth (preferably in the very early morning to allow the foliage to dry) and then repeating this routine for a total of three days; snipping the infested tips and discarding them into the trash; or introducing beneficial insects such as ladybugs, praying mantises, and green lacewings.

If spraying with a garden hose proves to be ineffective, or you do not want to wet the foliage for three days during a particularly damp season, try a mixture of one tablespoon (begin with a tablespoon or two, gradually increasing the dose as needed) of Dr. Bonner’s peppermint soap to one gallon of water. Spray liberally; this will suffocate the pesky creatures.

Ladybugs and praying mantises will stay if there is a continual supply of food. For the past several years we have done nothing at the onset of an aphid invasion. The welcome green lacewings have decided to call our garden home; the larvae of the green lacewing efficiently eradicates the aphids. Their nickname, “aphid lion,” gives an indication of the role the lacewings play in the rhythm of the garden.

Pruning is necessary to maintain the overall desired shape of the rose plant, to increase its number of blossoms, and to keep pests and diseases at bay. To encourage vertical growth while becoming established, climbers and ramblers should not be pruned. When it does become necessary to prune a rose plant, cut off to the base old, dark brown woody canes that are no longer flowering. Canes crossing over other canes can be removed for a neater appearance. Weak and twiggy growth and blackened tips from winter damage should also be removed.

Bourbon roses generally require minimal pruning. Roses that bloom repeatedly throughout the summer (this includes all the aforementioned Bourbons, with the exception of ‘Variegata di Bologna’) should be pruned just after the first flush of flowering. Repeat bloomers also benefit from diligent deadheading and an occasional neatening during their extended period of florescence, by removing tattered foliage and twiggy growth. In early March, and again after the first flush of flowers, remove weak and twiggy growth and apply a three- to four-inch layer of compost to the drip-line to help control black spot.

A sepal, a petal, and a thorn
Upon a common summer’s morn—
A flash of Dew—A Bee or two—
A Breeze—
A caper in the trees—
And I’m a Rose!

Emily Dickinson

End Notes: Please join me on Sunday, June 21st from 10 am to 11am for a book signing and informal lecture at the Sargent House Museum’s garden festival. For tickets and information about the weekend-long event, information is available on their website.

The 2009 Summer Concert Series at Willowdale Estate begins on Thursday, June 18th at 7:30 pm. “At the Heart of June” features the music of Martinu, Poulens, and Messiaen for piano, cello, clarinet, and violin. Light reception sponsored by Willowdale. Tickets are on sale now at Eden’s Edge.

David Bromige: 1933—2009

We were very sad to hear of the recent passing of noted poet and Black Sparrow author David Bromige. The acclaimed poet D.A. Powell has a touching remembrance of Bromige at The Poetry Foundation blog, Harriet: "I think I probably took 18 classes from David Bromige, including my undergraduate classes and my graduate courses. After completing my B. A., I hung around and did an M. A. in English. In 1993, as I was working on my thesis, the state of California — suffering from a budget crisis, as always — extended a 'golden handshake' offer to faculty at the top of the salary scale. It was a handsome deal, and David was one of many who were drawn into early retirement. One of the requirements, though, was that the retiree would have to cease work immediately; not even finishing out the semester. This would have left me without my poetry advisor. David graciously offered to oversee the completion of my studies without pay."

You can learn more about David Bromige at Wikipedia, and find a nice collection of online resources at the University of Buffalo.

Leithauser on Updike

Congratulations to those first fine five folks who emailed us for posters — they are on their way. Enjoy!

And a quick note: Godine author Brad Leithauser has a nice review today, at Slate, of John Updike's final collection of short stories. Brad writes, "It has become almost a cliché to marvel over Updike's adherence to Henry James's dictum that the writer should be 'one of the people on whom nothing is lost.' For Updike, no meaningful experience went unrecorded and unpublished, ingeniously translated into fiction or verse. Over time, loyal readers began to feel a companionable connectedness not merely with his writing but with his much-photographed life."

You can also read David Godine's thoughtful note on the occasion of Updike's passing here.

The Great Godine Poster Giveaway

We have some lovely posters here in our office (strays from BEA) which we are going to give away to the first five readers who email info@godine.com with the subject line BEA Poster Giveaway and their address in the message body.

The posters:

Back from BEA

We're all back from BEA, and wiped out. As has been widely reported, the show this year was smaller than in the past. A few of the heavy-hitters downsized from aisle-length booths to basement meeting rooms, fewer publishers were giving away galleys, and overall attendance was down (whether by nature or design, as I hear the officials were stingier this year with badges). Our booth was full of disappointment — not because we had less material to give away or took fewer orders than usual, or anything like that, but because David Godine had to leave for his daughter's high school graduation.

Aside from the disappointed faces of so many visitors to our booth — who inevitably were there because they're old friends of David — Book Expo 2009 was a great success. We gave away almost all of our galleys, most of our letterpress marketing material, all the posters we wanted to give, and got to meet some very interesting reviewers and other (always wonderful) industry people. There was plenty of interest in our new titles and we put together some very strong orders. If you were there and didn't see us, feel free to call up to place an order.

It's BEA Season!

Readers of this blog may have noticed how quiet it's been lately. This is due, in large part, to the fact that BEA Season has held our office hostage for the last few weeks. A shantytown of boxes, posters, galleys, bookmarks, foamcore-mounted book covers, and assorted letterpress giveaways, has been amassing around my desk as the day (this Thursday) approaches. I'm extremely grateful that the show is in New York this year, and not Los Angeles, as in 2008 — removes the momma-bird-like tension of letting all this precious promotional material out to cross the country in the hands of FedEx. I'll tell you what: it was a tense few days waiting for confirmation that everything had arrived in LA safe and sound. No such trauma this year.

We're going to have some really great promotional material available at the booth: galleys for Le Clézio's novel Desert and Robert Reid's memoir Arctic Circle; a set of pages from Yousuf Karsh's Regarding Heroes bound in a letterpress cover that David Godine printed himself; an essay from The Guardian (UK) on the enduring appeal of Lark Rise to Candleford, also with a DRG original letterpress cover; some gorgeous new posters; and a new array of bookmarks. If you're a bookseller in the area (right in the front, to the right of the main entrance as you come in) please stop by to say hello, take a look at our 2009 titles, and maybe even place an order. The list is altogether, I think, remarkably strong this year.

We'll be at booth 4204, hope to see you in NYC!

Sphinx Moths

I am frequently asked about sphinx moths, the most common question, “What is that furry flying creature nectaring at the butterfly bushes?” This week’s column is a recycled version of an older article on sphinx moths, which I hope you will find helpful. Photos of an unusual red form of the Virginia creeper sphinx moth caterpillar, and the eclosed adult, are also included.

We were delighted with the sheer numbers of Snowberry and Hummingbird Clearwing moths nectaring in our gardens this past summer. There were so many clearwings nectaring on a butterfly bush at Willowdale one afternoon that I actually saw two sort of crash into each other. I’ve sent for several snowberry bushes (Symphoricarpos albus var. albus) from a reputable mail order source and will keep you posted on their culture. Snowberry bushes are often seen in older gardens. They are a suckering shrub ideal for a dry, partly shaded location. They eventually grow to five feet, possibly higher. The bush has a lovely habit when, in late summer, the branches arch from the weight of the popcorn-look-alike plump white berries, and are juxtaposed against the deep green opposite leaves. Symphoricarpos albus var. albus is the species native to eastern regions of the United States; Symphoricarpos var. albus var. laevigatus is native to the Pacific Northwest. Snowberry, a member of the Caprifoliaceae (Honeysuckle Family), is a larval host plant for both the Hummingbird and Snowberry clearwing moths and the berries are an important winter food source for quail, grouse, and pheasant. Attention backyard gardeners: unfortunately snowberry is listed by the U.S. federal government as endangered in Massachusetts, Kentucky, Maryland, Illinois, and extirpated in Ohio.

I love plants that have a suckering habit because once they become established, as with our native spiraea (Spiraea latifolia), it is rewarding to dig up a clump and passalong to a fellow gardener. I am looking forward to receiving our suckering snowberry bushes!

I will be signing books at the Ipswich Garden Club’s much anticipated annual plant sale, this coming Saturday morning, beginning at 9:00 am. The plant sale is at the Hall-Haskell House/ Visitors Center.

This weekend only, the Wenham Museum is holding a new fundraising event titled Tablescapes, featuring table settings designed by local businesses. Briar Forsythe, the proprietor of Willowdale Estate, and I have partnered to create what we are calling an Alfresco Birthday Party in the Butterfly Courtyard Garden. For more information about Willowdale Estate, a full service special events venue, and their butterfly and songbird garden I designed, visit my webpage at Willowdale Estate. For more information about Tablescapes, visit the Wenham Museum’s website.

[Kim Smith is the author of Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities!]

Think Native Asters in Spring

We tend to think of asters only in fall. Surrounded by spring’s emergent beauty, it is easy to lose oneself in the flowering tree families of Magnoliaceae, Rosaceae, Cornaceae, and Fabaceae. Add to that the living picture of nesting songbirds, blossoming shrubs, bulbs, and wildflowers, then followed by summer’s luxuriant bounty — understandably so — we often fail to adequately plan in spring for fall blooms and butterflies. I encourage you to consider integrating native species of asters in your overall garden design. Plant aster seeds collected, a nursery-grown pot, or a pass-along from a friend, and, come next fall, you will be richly rewarded for your foresight. The luminous lower angle of light gilding the late summer New England landscape creates an ethereal haze when seen through the purples, lavender-blues, rosy-pinks, and white inflorescence of calico, New York, New England, late-purple, and smooth asters, to name but a handful, transforming roadside, meadow, and garden.

Asters are one of the most important plants for providing nectar in late summer and autumn for all categories of pollinators. Listed on the website of the Connecticut Botanical Society are perhaps thirty or so asters native to New England. The following three beauties I have in mind for your gardens not only provide nectar; they are also larval host plants for many species of Lepidoptera: smooth aster (Aster laevis), flat-topped white aster (Aster umbellatus), and New England aster (Aster novae-angliae). The neatly compact Wood’s asters that are commonly available at garden centers have their place in the landscape design when a low mounding plant is desired. We see comparatively far fewer butterflies on Wood’s asters than the three aforementioned straight species.

The flower clusters of flat-topped aster are usually flat, but occasionally may appear dome shaped. The lacey white ray flowers surround the yellow disk florets and the leaves are a larval food plant for the Harris Checkerspot butterfly (Chlosyne harrisii). Aster umbellatus grows anywhere from 2 to 7 feet. Typically, in the well-tended garden, it will grow towards the taller side, as does New England aster. Plant both in the back of the border. The foliage on the lower part of the stems of New England aster tends to dry out towards blooming time; plant lower- growing perennials such as Montauk daisy and goldenrods in the foreground to disguise the ratty looking foliage. Flat-topped asters, New England, and smooth asters begin to bloom in September. They tolerate a variety of soil and light conditions, however, they will thrive when planted in full sun and in rich, moist soil.

New England asters bloom in shades of deep purple and pink, more intense in color when compared to other native asters. I can’t talk about New England asters without mentioning my friend Joe Ann’s patch. Hers runs along the back length of her luxuriantly lush vegetable garden. In mid- to late September, the blossoms become a nectar magnet for all manner of pollinator on the wing. The combination of masses of Persian pink blossoms, bees, and butterflies are truly a sight to behold.

Not only are smooth asters a top source of nectar for Monarch butterflies (and many species of butterflies) during their annual fall migration, they are also a larval host plant for the Pearly Crescentspot (Phyciodes tharos) butterfly (see photo in last week’s column) and Northern Crescent (Phyciodes selenis). If I had to choose a favorite of the favorites, it would have to be smooth aster. The cheery lavender-blue ½ inch button-sized flowers are a lovely addition to the butterfly garden. I like that they reseed prolifically throughout the borders, realizing however, that this trait may not be to every one’s taste. Smooth aster is a common sight in our neighborhood and grows vigorously along the shoreline, particularly in wet swampy areas.

Generally speaking, the majority of native wildflower seeds will germinate without pretreatment when planted outdoors in fall or early winter. To plant in spring or summer, a physical modification to the seed’s coat is often needed to allow the embryo to mature or break dormancy. New England aster seeds require a period of moisture and cold after harvesting before they will germinate. If planting in spring, this period is artificially simulated by placing the moistened seed in a refrigerator for a certain length of time. Place the seeds in a small container with moist (not wet) sand, peat or vermiculite, and leave in the refrigerator for four to six weeks. This procedure is known as stratification, because of the layering of the seeds within the medium. Look at the seeds from time to time. The seeds must be kept moist while pre-chilling but it doesn't usually benefit them to be actually in water or at temperatures below freezing. Light is also beneficial after pre-chilling. Pre-chilled New England aster seeds should have only the lightest covering of compost or soil, 1/4 to 1/8 inch.

End Notes: — Weston Nurseries often carries ‘Alma Potchke,’ a lively, almost hot pink, cultivar of New England aster. Garden in the Woods at the New England Wild Flower Society offers the straight species of New England aster. I am giving away seeds of New England asters with purchase of book. — If you are planning to attend my class (first class is this coming Tuesday, May 5th) at the Arnold Arboretum, “Your Garden as Habitat,” please register at your earliest convenience to assure a spot. — Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities! would make a terrific Mother’s Day gift. Please come join me, if you can, the weekend of Mother’s Day at the upcoming book signings and events: — Barnes and Noble at the Prudential Center, Boston. Thursday May 7, 2009 at 4:30 pm. — Jabberwocky Bookshop at the Tannery in Newburyport on Friday May 8, 2009 at 7:00 pm. — The Stevens-Coolidge Place Annual Plant Sale on Saturday, May 9, 2009 from 10:00 am to 2 pm. Butterfly walks and book signing.

Jane's Walk in Cambridge

I'm still coming down from my Jane's Walk high. It was truly an exhilarating experience.

A couple months ago, Jane’s Walk USA asked us, the authors of Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the Story of Death and Life of Great American Cities, if we might organize a walk in our city. Begun in Canada the year after Jane died in 2006, the walks honor the memory and spirit of author and urban activist Jane Jacobs on the weekend closest to her birthday on May 4. According to Janeswalk.org, the walks offer "a street-level celebration of Jane Jacobs ideas and legacy."

This Saturday, our Jane's Walk here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a smashing success. We had chosen an urban fringe area on both sides of the railroad tracks between Porter Square and Sherman Street in North Cambridge. Within the last ten or fifteen years, these once crime-ridden, semi-industrial streets have sprouted attractive infill construction and gone through major rehab and reuse of old buildings.

We had forty enthusiastic walkers — many were longtime fans of Jane. And we were thrilled to have Jane's niece and nephew, Nancy and Robin McBride, as well as city councilor Henrietta Davis, former mayor Frank Duehay, and Michael Kenney, reporter from the Boston Globe. Charles Sullivan, the head of the city’s historical commission led us, brilliantly providing historical background, maps, and Winslow Homer’s 1859 engraving of a view along the tracks of Cambridge’s cattle market.

As we walked by a large co-housing project, a resident putting in her “sweat equity” took time from her gardening to describe life in an “intentional community.” One of our walkers, who lived in a converted broom factory that we passed on our route, invited us to see her glorious enclosed garden bordering the tracks. We also unexpectedly bumped into and heard insider views of the neighborhood from Joanna Malenfant, daughter of the late Geneva Malenfant whom Charlie Sullivan called “Cambridge’s own Jane Jacobs.”

Back in Porter Square, a large group of us wound things up at Christopher’s restaurant, not quite Jane’s White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street, but nevertheless an old neighborhood establishment in a nineteenth-century building. We sipped and ate and continued conversation.

The whole event was truly a blast, with its serendipity and lively discussion among the walkers. We loved gathering a group of folks for the sole purpose of strolling through a more-or-less ordinary neighborhood for a little urban exploration and contemplation.

Yes, the walk should certainly be the first of many. It far exceeded any of our expectations — in turn-out, chance encounters, and enjoyment.

Max Allen, a Jane’s Walk organizer in Toronto, had emailed on Friday that there were going to be 140 Walks in that city alone. Other Canadian cities boast many. American cities joined in this year. This feels like the beginning — or continuation — of a movement. Hats off to Jane Jacobs and her books!

[The author of this post is Glenna Lang, co-author of Genius of Common Sense, as well as several other Godine titles.]

Charting the Emotional Landscape

CHARTING the EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPE: The Fugue as Poem

Following the death of my father from metastatic lung cancer in 1991 (he had never smoked a cigarette), my relationship to language changed.

For decades I had forced it to carry the weight of my various frustrated angers, starting with the early poems of Mad Dog Black Lady (reprinted in African Sleeping Sickness). The contradiction inherent in the title of that first book amused me — being mad yet being polite about it. I wanted to "say it plain" as the dictum goes; but, my penchant for complexities, and admiration for the genuinely profound went artistically unsatisfied. I was constantly seeking a way to lend depth and scope to my poetry — particularly after being criticized for (apparently) writing too easily — something I was unaware of doing, since it may have taken hours of intense focus, a dozen revisions, over years, if lucky, to compose a given poem; although I managed an average of a hundred poems per year, in various stages of completion. (This does not rule out other types of writing experiences, such as the "automatic" and "being in the zone." Yet I'd hesitate to classify work emerging from those experiences as "easy.")

How, I wondered, does a poet make one's effort evident without putting the reader to sleep? How could I sustain my stubborn purpose and volcanic content without resorting to a traditional form, which might deaden my text in its familiarity? How do I invite the reader into the process, and yet "lock" my language? How do I present familiar emotional content in an unfamiliar form? How do I vent my fury, exuberance or love, all of those, and yet transcend it / them in the same extended moment?

Even as I asked such questions, my answer was coming about on its own — related to my childhood encounters with music (which I discussed in The Riot Inside Me), with an emphasis on the classical music taught in junior high school, coupled with my adult appreciation of the blues and jazz. I had always loved the minor keys, discordance and the contrapuntal as generators of musical ironies — and enjoyed their counterparts in elevated conversation and cultural dialogue. What knitting of a comprehensive musically inclined whole (akin to collage, perhaps pieces of Pound’s Cantos wiggling around in my subconscious and tripping across Theolonious) from fragments, the overheard, snippets of ideas, combined in unexpected ways, offered exciting, challenging and unexpected poetic leaps? My answer was the fugue. In it, one finds the discipline of structure wedded to the freedom of movement. When I went back and examined some of my longer poems, such as "Essay on Language" (6/86, in Heavy Daughter Blues), I realized that I had already begun exploring my version of the fugue.

Since, I've managed to compose five fugues. The playful "The Ron Narrative Reconstructions," a nod to poet Ron Silliman (in Bathwater Wine), was my first fully realized fugue, and was written in January 1995. "Salvation Wax" (10/95, also Bathwater Wine), was the third, the most biographical, and, I think, the most important of the fugues, the longest poem I have written to date; however, the last one, "Amnesia Fugue" (4/99), which appears in Mercurochome, has become my favorite. In these fugues, I am doing what was wished for in Hand Dance (performing 'the ritual of the whole . . . shaping a certainty'), as suggested in the form of the poems "ethiopian in the fuel supplies," "Essay on Language (2)," "Vet" and "Cancer" — poems in which I explore the "shattered narrative."

The series is completed with "Night Widow Fugue" (9/97), my homage to unmarried / unloved Black women of all ages. It is wed to "Sorceress of Muntu" (5/73), the first of the fugues drafted, but which remained unfinished until its revision in August 1997. In it, I pitch a royal bitch about my frustrated "writing career." I had intended to use "Sorceress" as the title poem of a separate manuscript; however, the phrases it apparently "needed" for completion had failed to materialize. I had tried fitting it into other manuscripts, but it overwhelmed them. In Ostinato Vamps (University of Pittsburgh Press) it is not only a perfect fit, but an exquisite climax. It equals "Amnesia" as my favorite of the fugues.

For the years between “Salvation Wax” and “Amnesia Fugue”, I favored the older work. Their common theme is the death of my eldest son from HIV / AIDS. In the first, he is dying. In the second he is dead. As time passes, the latter holds more emotional weight, therefore more impact. It is difficult for me to read it. I often present sections of "Salvation" in public; rarely so with "Amnesia," perhaps because there is still too much painful immediacy in its narrative. Too much sadness.

Will I write another fugue?

Perhaps.

The series seems to have ended itself. It’s as if I’ve exhausted the need that created these poems. I don’t know the definitive answer, although I wish I had the luxury of time to worry it onto paper. In the meantime, I regard the fugue as a remarkable way in which to recreate given moments, explore new impulses, expand aesthetic arguments, and refine one’s emotional content in the process of composing the poem. It is a form for those who delight in deepening revelations.

Le Clézio Reading at MIT

For those of you who missed the event, which I discussed briefly here, we've received permission from the author to post this recording of his MIT talk this past Tuesday. If you enjoy it — I think you just might — have a go at his novel The Prospector, before we release his breakthrough work, Desert.

Poetry Month Series: Lyn Lifshin

{In honor of National Poetry Month, Godine and Black Sparrow poets will be periodically commenting upon their work, their writing process, and the art of poetry.}

"Mint Leaves at Yaddo"

In the frosty glasses of
tea. Here, iced
tea is what we
make waiting for

death with this
machine my mother
wanted. Not knowing
if she’d still be

here for her birth-
day we still shopped
madly, bought her
this iced tea maker for.

For twenty days my
mother shows only
luke warm interest
in presents or tea,

vomits even water,
but I unpack the
plastic, intent
on trying this

sleek device while
my mother, queen
of gadgets —
even a gun to

demolish flies —
maybe the strangest
thing she got me,
can still see the

tall glasses that
seem summery on what
is the longest day.
Soon the light

will go she says
the days get shorter.
I can’t bear, she
mumurs, another

winter in Stowe and
I think how different
this isolation is,
this iced tea, this

time that stretches
where little grows
as it did, green
as that mint, except

my mother, smaller
more distant, gaunt


"The Writing of 'Mind Leaves at Yaddo'"
by Lyn Lifshin
originally appeared in Writer's Digest, 1994

Part I

"Behind the Poem,
Before the Time That Stretches"

I began to write early, had to write my own first poem a weekend after I’d copied, at age 6, a poem of William Blake’s and told my mother it was mine. Since we lived in a small town, it’s not surprising that she ran into my teacher on Main Street, told her she must have been an incredibly inspiration.

But I knew that I wanted to write, knew it almost that early. Still, even after my father gave an early poem of mine to Robert Frost, who wrote that he like the imagery in it, told my father to have me bring him more, I was afraid to take a creative writing class, afraid I couldn’t write enough, couldn’t write if I had to. Once I began, though, after putting things like finishing a PhD in the way like a roadblock, I found that I couldn’t imagine not writing poetry. In interviews, when asked about being so prolific (not always a compliment), I’ve found an answer: In the Eskimo language, the words for “to breathe” and “to make a poem” are the same.
When something terrible began happening to my mother, writing about it was a way to breathe through it, to shape what was happening or change it, in the only way I could. After receiving the news that what was thought first to be the flu was a terminal disease, I sat with my mother most of the day. We talked as much as she could. The TV was often on, a black scratchy colorless slash of a world that seemed far away. Later, as my mother dozed, cut off from everything, I wrote poems, tried to catch her words, objects in the room, the feeling of the days burning down. I jotted down phrases, images: bringing my mother chips of ice, her hunger for steak, roast beef, lamb chops, the IV tubes with their paraphernalia, strange words that became part of our vocabulary. Angio-cath, Heplock, striated ringer. When my mother sighed that she wanted to leave my sister’s house, something that would become more difficult as she got weaker and the tubes and drips became like ropes, or a leash, I often though of the film Midnight Cowboy, of John Voight rescuing a scrawny Ratso Rizzo and escaping for a last feverish trip to somewhere, anywhere.

My sister and I, knowing how ill she was, still shopped giddily, hysterically, for Mother’s Day gifts and, should she make it, presents for her birthday two weeks later. We knew people often hang on until their birthdays, but what do you get someone dying? We bought a black credit card holder she wanted but wouldn’t need, but rejected an expensive music box. It seemed as if my sister and I were buying it for ourselves. The Christmas before, my mother, always intrigued by gadgets, had bought someone an electric iced tea maker. She was fascinated by it. Though my sister and I thought the iced tea maker was absurd, another bit of clutter, that June it seemed to be the only thing we could come up with that might amuse and please her.

Much of what I wrote during that period was especially tight, restrained, pared down. It was as if, to get through what was happening, I’d kept superfluous things at a distance, contained, controlled, but with an undercurrent. I pared away much in my daily life: Poetry readings and teaching were put on hold. I lived in chinos and a black jersey. I rarely put on contact lenses (maybe only wanting to see what was near). Fresh ground coffee in the morning and Gentle Orange tea at night were my luxuries. Ballet class, my drug of choice, was out of the question. Even with so little exercise and so little that was comforting except food, I lost weight, as if to keep up with my mother. After her death, the poems began to take on a loose, sprawling, rambling shape, and within a weekend I gained back four or five pounds.

My isolation in Stowe wasn’t unlike the quite remoteness of Yaddo, the art colony I’d gone to 20 years earlier. In both Stowe and in Yaddo, the green branches clustered around the house, made rooms into jade caves. Twenty years earlier I was on the verge of divorce, on the verge of change and loss, just as I was in 1990. Outside everything was blooming. But inside, so much was shriveling. At Yaddo, magnolias and forsythia exploded, a rose bush matched the blush color of a sweater I wore. In Stowe, a huge pot of rouge petunias spilled across the redwood deck. The same stillness, the birds, the same slant of light. Hours spent standing at a window wrapped in that green, seemed to connect the two Junes.

On her birthday, my mother woke up feeling wonderful. She was animated and looked young in her jersey shift (later, I’d wash that shift, find chips of almond slivers, remnants of her last trip out to a mall). She seemed full of life, said she’d dreamt of eating all sorts of fruits on a picnic. Thrilled, we bought watermelon, peaches, cherries and took a ride up to the top of one of the tallest Stowe mountains. But the road was twisting and, with the tumor spreading inside, she became nauseated. The day was ruined. The iced tea maker she opened later, after a few hours of rest, was not the success it might have been before the ride. She was too tired to open all the cards. “There’s so many,” she said. “You could have saved some for next year.” I wrote phrases like that in my notebook. I still have those fragments, most consisting of a line on the top of a page, the rest blank.

Part 2

"In the Poem, In the Longest Days"

It was the smell of fresh mint that triggered this poem. In workshops, I try to get students to trust their senses. As much as music and sound and touch flash memories and feelings back, smell does so even more vividly. When I smelled mint in the iced tea, I felt the magical quiet of Yaddo, calm amber light from the stained glass windows (images included in early versions of the poem). Those honeyed shades, so full of the color that was missing the June of the poem, were vivid but slowed the poem down. It was the memory of those tall glasses of iced tea with mint dripping from them that started first with the physical – the tawny, shiny, glistening amber glass – then moved on to the emotional, to feelings connected with the time that the image of iced tea connects with, and then leaped on to something like an epiphany.

In 1978 Beacon accepted my first anthology, Tangled Vines. At the time I had written almost nothing about mothers and daughters. It was my father, first emotionally and then physically absent, who was the subject of some poems. But once I’d immersed myself in this new subject, my poems on that relationship, now a main theme, a main obsession, started. As my mother aged, poems of rebellion changed to poems anticipating loss, a theme central to my poetry from the start. Images of “dissolving” stud the poems from my first book of poems, Why Is the House Dissolving?, published by Open Skull Press. My first published poem, in Syracuse 10, (the one that Robert Frost liked) ends with an image of loss and dissolving. The Poem, “Disillusions,” uses the image of a child’s shadow dissolving when a cloud breaks the spell of the shadow “and his dream-mate disappears.”

I often think of poems as a way to hold, to keep a moment, like photographs – the first things I packed and took from my mother’s. “Mint Leaves at Yaddo” is a freeze frame. An image of an afternoon. Here the mother is literally and symbolically dissolving, as is the light. Like the last two stanzas, more of her, more in her life, becomes pared down, less full, physically, emotionally, and psychologically. The things she can control, where she can move, are contracting like the ice in the cubes, dying like the flies, the light. As people’s ability to be effective and to interact with the world goes, their world becomes their night table, the pillows, the sheets, the bed. My mother wanted the clock just so on the pine nightstand, Life Savers candies close enough to reach for, her slippers pointed a certain way. As her life became reduced to rituals involving the basic things, getting to the bathroom, washing her hands, and all her energy was used up trying to do them, telling me how I should help her do them, our lives contracted together, were limited more and more to just her room.

The first draft of “Mint Leaves at Yaddo” was more descriptive. But I thought the poem would work better if it started, as it does now, with the image of calm evenings at Yaddo, then contrasted that with the dead, waiting, quiet in Stowe. I’ve tried typing the poem in longer lines, too. But in this version the enjambment and run-on lines put an emphasis on certain key words. By breaking the lines as I have, I can emphasize double meanings and twists more powerfully. For example, by breaking birth-/day, I can call up a birth that is really the birth of her last days, is death. By separating the eighth line, “if she’d still be,” I hope for a double suggestion of “being,” and “being here.”

I wanted to capture both the rush of time and the sense of everything being static, frozen, of the speaker rushing toward what she is pulling back from. The repetition of for in lines 12 and 13 operates to show the daughter’s mad search for a “present for” the mother slamming into the mother’s apathy, “For 20 days she shows little interest,” which shifts the mood. I used breathless run-on lines filled with images of things contracting and icing – the running out to shop, then the waiting to unpack – to suggest the frenzy caught in those frozen hours. I wanted to capture the rhythm of the days, the ordinary and blunt, slashed by something that startled, some beauty – the vomit bins contrasting with light on the tea reminding me of other days, just as I imagined my mother, seeing the tall glistening glass, must have drifted back to days on the front porch on North Pleasant where she grew up, or to afternoons with someone who mattered in Boston or New York City, before her children became her life. Even the poem, someone has suggested, is in the shape of a tall glass of iced tea, long and narrow as the days.

The speaker in the poem tells us it is the longest day, the longest day of summer. But longest is a charged word, and suggests the verb “to long,” as well as something hard to get through. Because there was light to see longer, the speaker sees what she is losing. What had seemed long – life – is becoming shorter. The mother notices, as well as says, “Soon the light will go, the days get shorter.” Color will be drained away like flesh, health, time, and the mother and daughter’s connection. That glass only seems summery. There is little to make this a period of fulfillment, fruitfulness, happiness or beauty. What is ahead is the opposite of summer. Nothing will be fed, kept or maintained. The word summery hints at “summary,” an adding up.

In the mother’s murmur that she couldn’t “bear another winter in Stowe,” that bear is full of irony. In contrast with the trees leafing out, ready to bear new fruit, the mother can no longer bear new life, can barely bear life at all. The dying begin to lose modesty, to find things they’d once found embarrassing unimportant. As the mother begins to separate from her body, she is in many was more “bare.”

My mother was an actress, able to sound perky and upbeat when she was in Intensive Care. Even before she was sick, if I failed to call her when she expected me to, she might hide her disappointment expertly or become enraged. In the poem she is losing her mask, her costumes, becoming bare, unmade up. In writing so many poems about her during this period, maybe I was making her up since she no longer could.

The word still, in the line “can still see the tall glasses,” also shimmers with suggestions. There is the stillness and the quiet, as well as the suggestion that, although she is still able to see, still alive, she won’t “still be” for long. And, once again, this scene is a still, a stopped frame of what is unraveling. Like the mint trapped in the tea, the mother and daughter are held in this moment.

The word present, mentioned earlier, also evokes many things. It is a “moment in time, perceptible as intermediate between past and future, a definite now.” And it is also “being at hand, being alert to circumstances, attentive, readily available.” Then the mother’s and daughter’s presents, gifts to each other, are central to the poem; both the literal gifts of the tea maker and the gun for killing flies, as well as the emotional giving and taking. Even the legal definition of present, to let it be known, could be said to be implied.

There is a lot the mother in the poem can’t bear, besides pain she never speaks of. I tried to capture an eerie undercurrent, the tension. How it was getting icier. Nothing was green in the middle of that summer’s greenness. All the green surrounding the mother and daughter, all the ivy and the trees that were growing closer, pressing against glass, seemed to underline how the mother was only growing smaller, growing away. Traditionally, green suggests youthful, vigorous, brand new, though it can also remind the reader of the green plot of a cemetery, or even the description of someone ill who is “green,” pale or wan. As in Federico García Lorca’s “Somnambulistic Ballad” (a poem I focused on for half a year in college, with the haunting, recurring line “Green, green, I want you green”), green also suggests a longing for what could grow, while it foreshadows death. Repetition of words and cadences such as “this isolation is, this iced tea, this time…” uses s and t sounds like hisses to contribute to the dream-nightmare mood. The linking of life and death is conveyed through rhythms, assonance and alliteration (make waiting and machine my mother and shows only), which connect on a less conscious level to those in earlier writing… from the Haggadah to the passages on death in Sir Thomas Browne’s “Urn Burial.”

There is a contrast between the tea makers, plastic, “a sleek device,” hardly vulnerable, which is being unpacked, and the mother, flesh disappearing, incredibly vulnerable, emotionally and physically “packing it up.” The glass of iced tea is like a mirror, reflecting a glass that seems between the mother and daughter: hard, fragile, brittle and breakable, a mirror the speaker and her mother watch to see what is past and what is coming in. The glass with tea in it also distorts, fragments, twists, enlarges, splits, makes ripples and waves in what is perceived, as the roles of the mother and daughter distort as they start to reverse.

“Not knowing” underlies the poem. The speaker doesn’t know if her mother will live; the mother’s words are a coded fear that she doesn’t know what is ahead and seems unable to talk directly about it. “Shopping madly” suggests not only the frenzy of the daughters trying to find something to show love to the mother, but also their anger that the mother is ill, is going to abandon them, leave them.

My mother fell for almost any new gadget, and would, when she came to visit, always include something we’d groan and shake our heads at, like the fly-killing gun in the poem. But the poem shows those gadgets suddenly without power. Although there are machines in the poem (the machine for making tea, and the “machine” to kill flies), there is no deus ex machina that will rescue her. Or us. Somehow, in luring the daughters to get this tea maker, the mother in the poem retains some control. Early in the poem the phrase “Here, iced tea is what we make waiting for death,” while contrasting this to what iced tea suggested at Yaddo, implies an atmosphere where the speaker seems controlled by what is going on around her, is “in service,” and there is an edge in the phrase. A mother’s control and criticisms of a daughter are often a luxury of health. Until the end, my mother told me my skirt was too short, my hair against her skin hurt her. In the poem, the mother is still queen. My brother-in-law described my sister and me during those days as ladies in waiting; there, ready, waiting and waiting.

In writing about mothers and daughters in Tangled Vines, I made connections to mythic mothers and daughters. So often the mother is less fairy godmother than bad witch, either binding and suffocating her daughter or sending her out into wilderness. There is often a pattern of the martyr mother and the dutiful daughter. In “Mint Leaves at Yaddo,” the daughter empties vomit bowls and shops for gifts while the mother suffers rather silently. I’ve often used the Daphne myth in my work, a woman running into trees to escape a lover. Here the myth is changed, perverted. The trees surround the speaker but offer no refuge. Instead, they flaunt their green. Nothing soothes or offers escape. Worse than not being a refuge, the green leaves are more like a cage. There is a suggestion of the Persephone and Demeter myth here, only it is not the mother sending the daughter off into the underworld and bringing darkness, but the daughter whose mother is slipping into that darkness. “I can’t bear another winter,” the mother sighs, but the truth is that there is only winter and that there will be no more springs.

As noted above, I’ve been fascinated by the intensity and ambivalence of mother and daughter poems. There is so much emotional rawness in this relationship, even when the mother and daughter are separated or estranged, in life or by death; there seems to be energy that is never casual, unimportant or totally finished. Even in the most loving of these poems, there is an image of something darker. A child cuddled in pink is held, yes, but often feels suffocated. Vines that nourish can also strangle.

“Mint Leaves at Yaddo” stops before poems based on dreams I had in which my mother was suspended between being the woman who could open jars nobody else could and something shriveled, held almost in a cocoon. This poem is frozen in time; it shapes what was fluid the way the glass holds the tea, caught, suspended, a vial of June months before a time when I can no longer expect to hear my mother’s voice on my answering machine.

It stops before the bedroom transformed by padding, walkers, a wheelchair, before rooms in which emptying each drawer is like excavating a city under ash. It stops before that house is gulped by an earthquake even as those in it are still reaching for each other.

Poetry Special Ends Today!

Those of you who are on our email list (contact us by email to join while we sort out a glitch in our listserve system) or are fans of ours on Facebook already know this; for Poetry Month, Godine and Black Sparrow have had three titles on special offer only through our website: a classic American author in The Poems of Charles Reznikoff, a new voice with Metropolitan Tang, and an indecisive choice (we understand) with the anthology Poets of the New Century. But, since 30 days has April, tomorrow first thing AM we'll be removing the offer — so hurry!

JMG LeClezio at PEN World Voices / MIT

Today at the great, long-standing literary blog LitKicks, independent publishing professional Dedi Felman reports on J.M.G. LeClézio's conversation with Adam Gopnik at the PEN World Voices event in New York City. Dedi writes, "Le Clezio's affinity is for an era of suspicion, not style. He never lived in Paris and was distrustful of a literature that wanted to deliver a strong message to the world. [At this point, Gopnik rather hilariously points out to the audience that the mints of which Le Clezio is partaking have a picture of members of the previous Administration and are labeled 'indict-mints.'] Trying to make sense for the American audience of Le Clezio’s apparent apolitical politicization, Gopnik asks the author if his is a humanism without a human being at the center? 'I wish I could do that but I am a human being and everything I do comes from that,' Le Clezio somewhat mystifying [sic] replies."

We had the chance to hear the Nobel Laureate speak and answer questions from the audience last night at MIT. He began by admitting that he was not a theorist and, so, "have no theory," which was quite funny I thought, and then touched upon many of the same issues that he did in New York. Most notably, he discussed the question of message and meaning in his novels. To a question of whether he felt that a novel ought to express some particular type of message — be it political, moral, humanist, etc. — Le Clézio responded that writing should always be "in praise of the language," and that if a novel has a message, whatever it might be, the message always "has value." It made me sorry that I can't read him in the original French to experience the language first hand.

Responding to another question from the audience, Le Clézio asserted that writers as human beings "are not exceptional" and have no special knowledge with which to offer the world social or political solutions, which might have a connection to the modest humanism that Dedi reports as "mystifying" — the easy, conversational style he employed while addressing a group of maybe 200 was decidedly of a man speaking out of the crowd, not down to it, and out of human experience, unabashedly. The impression one might have received from most news reports last Fall was of a writer with political and social agendas driving his novels, but that doesn't come across at all as he presents his own work.

It was an illuminating conversation, and hopefully we'll be able to provide a complete recording of the talk through our website soon, pending permission.

Rotten Island Review

It seems that every time I check my email, someone alerts me to a new book website or blog that I hadn't encountered already, discussing or reviewing one of our books. Most recently, it was Vintage Kids' Books My Kid Loves, whose author reviews a children's book every day, talking about the recently reprinted Rotten Island, by William Steig. She writes, 'I'd originally steered away from Steig because at first glance I'd incorrectly assumed his work was vulgar and too quirky for kids, but the more and more I read, the more I understand that his is an art of the highest order. His humor and vision are so original and such a delight. . .' Book reviews in major publications are great, and still important, but for our children's titles nothing really beats an enthusiastic recommendation of one mom to others!

Saroyan on Creeley & Olson

At The Poetry Foundation, Black Sparrow author Aram Saroyan has an article in which he makes the case, 'Charles Olson and Robert Duncan seem to me to be major American poets, great and generative figures as much today as they were during the ’60s. Denise Levertov is a personal favorite, though her range is more modest. Robert Creeley and Edward Dorn, on the other hand, wonderful poets in youth, both seem to have lost their way in midlife.' The comments on this article are, shall we say, engaged.

For those who are interested, Black Sparrow offers a ten-volume set of the correspondence between Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, two titles from Edward Dorn, two titles from Aram Saroyan, as well as Ekbert Faas' biography Young Robert Duncan. You needn't ever leave our website, is essentially what I'm telling you.

Nobel Prize–Winner J.M.G. LeClézio Reading in Boston

2008 Nobel Prize Winner in Literature
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
Tuesday, April 28 2009
6:00—8:00 pm
A Talk and reading (in English),
"The Writer and the World: Reflections of an Author."
MIT Building 32, Room 123
77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge MA
map & directions
Buy a copy of The Prospector before the event!

Poetry Month Series: Leland Kinsey

{In honor of National Poetry Month, Godine and Black Sparrow poets will be periodically commenting upon their work, their writing process, and the art of poetry.}

"Into the Badlands"

The high plains were in late light,
but the bottom of the river-, wind-, and rain-torn
gorges below us lay dark. If I’d descended
the steep hand carved road at night,
I wouldn’t have realized the size
of the vestibule of hell I was entering.
The tops of crags and hills looked red,
as if moss-covered, but from the near slope I could see
it was all rusted rock, as though you’d taken
the peen of a hammer and busted
metallic stone to a pebble debris.
Here and there large pieces of the same rock
sat like birettas atop free-standing Wgures,
fat or thin, of rock like concrete.
Hoodoos. Minor gods to the Indians,
who, like me, hadn’t known the world was so old.
Smudges fumed by the camp as we arrived,
the men sat with nets on their heads,
mosquito season, a soft storm of insects.
Sternberg, the old man himself, said they’d exposed
so many bones they’d have to trust
I was any good. Said he’d dug here
for several years now, the best dinosaur hunting
in the world. A fellow named Barnum Brown
had been earlier, but others just ruined their Wnds.
The Sternbergs had been called in to get the fossils
out of the diYcult stone. “Barnum dug all over
my diggings in Wyoming,” he said,
“and then brought his tents and act up here.
He shipped to the great museums of the world,
and the Canadians decided to keep some bones
home, and brought us in.” First lessons.

The Wrst morning I drove a team far
up a creek bed. I headed for three perfectly rounded
hills, the tois tits I thought, each topped
with a small stony cap like a nipple.
Their lower sides looked like beech bark
deeply scarred by bear claws. I soon lost
sight of them in the ridges, hummocks, ledges,
tunnels, and outwashes, switchbacks,
small canyons, terraces, and lofty outcrops.
Sternberg would later lend me a book
detailing the tortures of early travelers
trying to Wnd their way across this tortuous land.
I found my way up to a ledge where a skull
lay half dug out. Teeth like bowie knives,
eye sockets the size of my head. One son
was already starting to plaster. Tissue paper
went on Wrst, to keep the plaster from sticking,
he said, when they Wnally cleaned the whole thing
in weeks or months of work. Then he laid
on strips of cloth soaked in plaster.
Once the top was done I waited hours
while they dug underneath with hand tools
and small brushes, turned the skull over
on the now hardened cast and did likewise
to the rest till it all was encased, and loaded it
on a small pallet-like skid. My work began,
to get the horses to drag that heavy
new-made mummy down with little jarring
and no breakage through a bad stretch
of badlands to the wagon landing
near where the scows were tethered
to the river shore.
There seemed an odd echo.
My grandfather had told how he worked
for several years in the century before
making "Mummy Paper."

{ed: "Mummy Paper" is the title of the next section of this longer piece, titled "Alberta Wheat Fields;" many of the poems in this collection are linked thusly.}

Traveling to do research for a poem may seem like an odd idea, but in the fall of 2004 that’s what I set out to do. A French-Canadian immigrant, whom I’d met as an old man had gone by rail from northern Vermont to the Alberta wheat fields to work horses in the nineteen-teens. Besides doing that, he’d wound up hauling bones out of the dinosaur badlands. I drove only during the day, to see what he’d seen. Twelve hours a day, 725 miles a day for three days, and I was in Medicine Hat. I camped in the badlands near where paleontologists camped as they dug the richest fossil beds in the world. Coyotes and mule deer moved past my tent in the night. Lightly colored prairie falcons whirling overhead during the day reminded me of standing under eastern pale chanting goshawks over the Serengeti, about which I written in my previous book, and the landscape had similarities as well. I hiked deep into the dry digging areas during the day. I happened to meet a man and his young daughter on a trail; I asked him about his family in the area. His grandparents had moved from Minnesota in 1914 as the wheat lands opened. We talked long past his daughter’s tolerance. I also stopped at local historical societies, and aged general stores to meet oldsters. I drove through lands owned by the Blackfoot and the Blood, Indians with whom the immigrant had had dealings. And I spent a good deal of time at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, one of the world’s great fossil collections, up the Red Deer River from the badlands. Then three more days driving home in late fall, the time the immigrant returned those years he went. Material from that trip wound up in ten pages in the long poem “Alberta Wheat Fields,” and its subsections “Into the Badlands,” and “City of Geese,” in my book The Immigrant's Contract. My trip gave my character’s voice veracity.

(This poem appears in Leland Kinsey's collection The Immigrant's Contract.)

Banville at The Paris Review

The Paris Review "Art of . . ." interview series is probably the finest of its type, allowing readers to see into the working mind of beloved authors; it has also, in the most recent issue, reached its 200th installment, and their bicentenary author is John Banville, winner of the prestigious Man-Booker Prize and author of, among many other fine novels, Mefisto and The Newton Letter. (via Mark Sarvas) From other interviews I've seen, Banville is extraordinarily open and articulate about his writing and the process of writing in general. From the interview:

BANVILLE: It all starts with rhythm for me. I love Nabokov’s work, and I love his style. But I always thought there was something odd about it that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Then I read an interview in which he admitted he was tone deaf. And I thought, that’s it—there’s no music in Nabokov, it’s all pictorial, it’s all image-based. It’s not any worse for that, but the prose doesn’t sing.

Poetry Month Series: Linda Bamber

[In honor of National Poetry Month, Godine and Black Sparrow poets will be periodically commenting upon their work, their writing process, and the art of poetry.]

“Suddenly The City”
I live in seems interesting
as if I were on vacation here
and feeling indulgent
towards the human race, its way of
living in cities and
tearing up roads so the traffic has to be
re-routed around a collapsing white mesh barrier
as in this intersection here.
The people of this city
walking back and forth on the sidewalks
each one having gotten up and dressed this morning
look like this, this
movie, almost, of people crossing the street.
The questions,
is this scene in any way rewarding to look at?
e.g., architecturally, in terms of city spaces and human interest; and
are things diverse enough here? and
are these people, in general,
older of younger than I am? just now are
in abeyance. In their absence is this
pleasant sense that there are many cities in the world
and this is one of them.
It rained earlier. I think I’ll go see the monks
make a sand mandala on the Esplanade; and
who knows, later I might get a sandwich.

“Procrastination Over, I get to Know Some Students”
One is bashful
like a woman raised in a different tradition,
some downcast, sidelong, hand-to-mouth
(to hide a smile) tradition.
Honored to be talking of Ideas,
she has dyed her hair
bright pink – wrong, wrong,
as is the eyebrow ring
on this grad-school-bound great big
girl with great
mind-mouth coordination. Another
is slender and discontent.
She stands, I sit, she, impatient, shifts
long straight black hair. A stabled
horse. What’s this class about? She says. Nothing real.
What would be real is World War I
or II. I extend a carrot on a hand, which
she sniffs, but doesn’t seize;
snorts, wheels, leaves.
I am relieved
as when particularity returns
to winter days. Yesterday the snow was pock-marked.
Now great
sleet and haze.

I teach a course on Buddhism and American poetry, and Buddhist ideas are an essential part of my inner life; but sometimes I wonder whether any of my own poems would qualify for inclusion in the course. Perhaps the Buddhist ideas are more part of the process than the manifest content of my poetry. A Buddhist concept we are all familiar with is that happiness is in the here and now, however repetitive or mundane things may seem at the time. In the two preceding poems I seem to have written about moments that might not have seemed poem-worthy if I weren’t enough of a Buddhist to think that all moments are created equal. The first, “Procrastination Over,” concerns the teaching life (a topic that is almost universally avoided by American poets – although 95% of them teach!) All teachers long for more time for ‘our own work’ and at times resent our repetitive task. Didn’t we just teach a load of students last semester? Why does it have to be done again now? The same might be said, of course, of brushing one’s teeth, getting groceries, filling the tank with gas. How can we show up for the exasperating banality that characterizes so much of life? Each cohort of new students leaves after a few months, only to be replaced by a new cohort, and so on ad infinitum. “Procrastination Over” is about a moment when I stopped resisting my boring task and finally gave it my all. Of course what happened was that not only my students but life itself became interesting: “Yesterday the snow was pockmarked; now, great sleet and haze.” Attend to one thing fully, say the Buddhist teachers, and everything snaps into focus. “Suddenly the City” takes a slightly different approach, diagnosing the mental afflictions that make life dull: judgment and comparison. “Don’t compare,” says Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. In the blessed, momentary absence of comparison, I had an experience of my city and myself as perfectly okay. Just then, everything was of equal weight. Tibetan monks on the banks of the Charles River, in Boston? Nothing to comment on. A sandwich for lunch? How remarkable! Truly, for a moment there, I got it.

(Both poems above appear in Linda Bamber's debut collection, Metropolitan Tang.)

Poetry Month Series: Wes McNair

[In honor of National Poetry Month, Godine and Black Sparrow poets will be periodically commenting upon their work, their writing process, and the art of poetry.]

"After My Stepfather's Death"
Again it is the moment when I left home
for good, and my mother is sitting quietly
in the front seat while my stepfather pulls me
and my suitcase out of the car and begins
hurling my clothes, though now
I notice for the first time how the wind
unfolds my white shirt and puts its slow
arm in the sleeve of my blue shirt and lifts them
all into the air above our heads so beautifully
I want to shout at him to stop and look up
at what he has made, but of course when I turn
to him, a small man, bitter even this young
that the world will not go his way, my stepfather
still moves in his terrible anger, closing the trunk,
and closing himself into the car as hard as he can,
and speeding away into the last years of his life.

(from The Town of No & My Brother Running,
and the forthcoming Lovers of the Lost: New and Selected Poems)

Note from the Poet
This poem is based on a traumatic event I experienced as a teenager when my stepfather became violent, as he sometimes did, and I had a hard time writing the piece because the facts of what actually happened kept getting in my way. Looking back I remembered how the shirts my stepfather threw landed on the hay stubble alongside the road, and I was drawn to how the stubble poking up through the shirts imitated the hurt I felt. Only when I changed my description and showed him throwing the shirts into the air did the poem begin to feel right, and after the revision came to me, I saw why. Through my stepfather’s gesture of releasing the shirts and creating something beautiful by accident, I had suggested his submerged creative life and a connection between him and me that the son misses and the older narrator observes. In my mind as I rewrote my poem was my stepfather’s artistic self: the soap carvings he saved from his childhood and the awkward drawings he hung in the family house. By making him, to my own surprise, a sympathetic figure whose anger separates him from that self, I reshaped my trauma into a kind of forgiveness.

A Note from Peter Bowler

[Peter is a longstanding Godine author. His Superior Person’s books about weird words and deceitful language have appeared in Godine lists since the mid-eighties, and are among our most beloved titles.]

I came across the Godine Blog site more or less by accident today, and was delighted to find that the firm is holding its head up in these difficult times; David’s comments in interviews make that clear. It speaks volumes for the cause of small, quality publishers that David can maintain previous business levels, that his direct mail drop has done surprisingly well, that he is not unduly affected by bookstore closures, and that he has even been able to buy in a lot of great British books lately. Well done, David! And, on top of that, there is the reflected light of a Nobel Prize, and the continuing readiness of DRG to publish creative writing that many other publishers can’t or won’t.

Those deranged people – my regular readers – may perhaps wonder what I am writing now. My current project is a novel. Subject matter: murder, madness, and mystery in the world of high-end record collecting! Adorned, needless to say, with my usual mixture of cheap humour and ill-conceived displays of recondite erudition. Will it win me the Nobel Prize? Hmmm . . . .

By the way, my email address is pbowler {at} nnsw {dot} quik {dot} com {dot} au, and I would love to hear from you.

Phillip Lopate on Charles Reznikoff

JBooks.com, the online Jewish book community, has posted Phillip Lopate's introduction to By the Waters of Manhattan, the novel by acclaimed author Charles Reznikoff, recently republished by Black Sparrow Books. Here is a brief excerpt, but please visit JBooks to read the rest of his excellent essay:

"Among those who cherish his tender, translucent, humane poetry, Charles Reznikoff is a venerated figure, a role model of integrity and sustained excellence. During most of his lifetime (1894-1976), he had been so underrated and neglected that he developed a kind of stoical, resigned shell, going his own way. In person (I saw him on numerous occasions before he died), Reznikoff gave off an obliging, almost meekly humble impression, but there was a stubborn will underneath; his dedication to his art was unshakeable. You can see it from his correspondence, that remarkable, moving record in Selected Letters of Charles Reznikoff, 1917-1976 (Black Sparrow Press, 1997). If publishers would not accept his poetry manuscripts, he would print them himself. He also had that grain of selfishness that all writers need, however annoying to their loved ones. Though his wife Marie yearned for years to quit her high school teaching job, Charles, the most devoted, uxorious of husbands, nevertheless would not become a go-getter. He refused to practice law, though he had a degree. Instead, he held down jobs that would afford him the mental freedom to pursue poetry and fiction: he wrote tedious legal definitions for textbooks, sold hats, and, ill-suited as he was temperamentally to service the Hollywood dream factory, polished screenplays for his boyhood friend, producer Albert Lewin.

Towards the end of his life, he was taken up by the younger members of the New York School of poetry and the descendents of the Objectivists, and treated reverently by them, like a fragile, priceless grandparent, a last link to the pioneers of the 20s and 30s. Reznikoff, glad for the appreciation, did not know quite what to make of it, just as he had been puzzled decades earlier when championed by Louis Zukofsky (whose abstruse criticism he could barely decipher) as a sort of instinctual Objectivist poet. The problem with that annexation was that Reznikoff was no primitive: he was extremely intelligent, rigorous, and, in his own non-showy way, committed to an ambitiously austere aesthetic program of his own"

Le Clezio Discusses Language

J.M.G. Le Clézio is the author of The Prospector and the forthcoming Desert

Notes from a Godine Intern: Jessica O'Neill

{Editor's note: the internship program at Godine has a more than three-decade–old tradition of fine young people — students or recent graduates, mostly — working with us for three to four months and learning the trade of publishing through real experience; they proofread, edit, opine, write copy, work sales projects, and even occasionally design, along with the myriad daily office duties we require to run efficiently; they're as important to us as a full staff member.}

After interning at Godine for nearly three months, the most valuable acquisition I have made was not that of a book manuscript or a cover image, but the office’s water cooler — or as it’s called in New England, the “bubbler.” {ed: Jess is from New Jersey} This isn’t to say that I have been given dull or meaningless projects; to the contrary: the projects I work on are usually interesting and always meaningful to the company (or at least that’s what they tell me) {ed: it's true}.

I simply want to point out what a rather epic change in the day-to-day life here of Hamilton Place this cooler has been. Previous to its arrival, everyone brought drinking water. It could be considered typical for people to provide their own bottled water in an office setting, if they are being so picky as to require their water in bottles. However, drinking the tap water here is not recommended — in fact, it’s impossible. It’s brown, to be exact.

Within a week of beginning work here, I received repeated warnings to take care not to drink the water, not even for rinsing dishes. I would not have heeded these warnings, as I’m not typically frightened by drinking tap water, but the brown tinge of the water definitely called the consequences of consuming this water into question. Unfortunately, the old charming brick building where our office is located comes with equally old charming plumbing.

For the first few weeks here, life was tough. I lugged an enormous water bottle to the office every day, praying that I would not need more than a liter. Occasionally, someone would venture down to the 7 – 11 on the corner to buy a gallon for coffee, but most of my earlier days here suffered from drought, draft, and decaffeination.

Since the addition of cool, clean water to our office, however, the mood at Godine has certainly brightened: no more parched throats, or cracked, dry voices are heard talking miserably on the phone; no more frigid, coffeeless, winter mornings; no more frost-bitten fingers longing for a warm mug to hold. And that’s not all: our water cooler comes equipped with an extra special hot water nozzle that provides boiling hot water instantly. This hot water nozzle continuously incites excited discussion from David Godine about the ease of making Hot Chocolate, though we have not yet seen any conspicuous empty packets around. Today, while refilling my relatively light-weight 20 oz bottle of water at the cooler, David remarked, “Don’t you love it? Isn’t it just great?” Every time David hears the “bubbler” working its magic, he cannot resist the urge to comment on it.

Thus, despite the ever-varying tasks I have completed since working here (most of which do not include getting lost among a tower of dull paperwork or running out for coffee, as other publishing internships’ might), taking responsibility for bringing water, that staple of human existence, to the staff at Godine, has been my most rewarding endeavor.

Andrew Motion on Retiring from the Laureate Post

At The Guardian: an editorial from Andrew Motion on his eminent retirement from the post of British Poet Laureate. He writes, "As I say, in this respect nothing much seems to have changed in the past 10 years. But even as I repeat that, it feels not quite right. Why? Because even if the press doesn't always reflect it, the mood within the poetry-writing and reading community itself feels different these days. It's difficult to be precise about this change, but my sense is that we have learned to live with the variety of poetry being written in the country more happily than we used to do. The old sense of "them" and "us", establishment and avant-garde, London and regions, has matured into a curiosity that is willing to cross old boundaries. The health and diversity of creative writing programmes has helped to make this happen; so has the rise of non-metropolitan and internet poetry publishers; so has the work of interested parties such as the Arts Council and the Poetry Society. But it doesn't mean we can now settle back and congratulate ourselves on reaching the end of a difficult road. Once upon a time the challenge was to learn tolerance. Now it's to develop more appropriate sorts of critical language and expectation for particular kinds of work. We want to live in a culture where everything is welcome, but not in one where anything goes."

Trumpeting the Trumpet ~ Native Honeysuckle

This past weekend I set up shop at the annual Mass Audubon Birders Meeting. I was there to listen to the day-long programs and to sell Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities with other nature- and bird-related books offered by Godine. I can hardly give a good reporting of any of the programs presented as I felt it irresponsible to leave my table unattended and was only able to poke my head into the lecture hall sporadically. Fortunately, for me, my table was placed next to Peter Alden’s and Jennifer Forman-Orth’s shared table. Jennifer is a biologist who works for the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture and travels around the state to educate people about how to recognize the dreaded Asian Longhorned Beetle (Anoplophora glabripennis) and its devastating effects. Peter Alden is the author of fifteen books on North American and African wildlife, including the Audubon Field Guide to New England (with Brian Cassie), Field Guide to Invasive Plants of New England, and Audubon Field Guide to Florida, which he co-wrote with Rick Cech (Cech is the author of Butterflies of the East Coast, which regular readers know is a book I highly recommend). We own a well-worn copy of Alden’s Field Guide to New England — a book that belongs in the home of every New England family.

I made the acquaintance of Katrina Kruse who was at the meeting representing Houghton Mifflin. We were talking about garden design and difficult areas in the landscape when she asked for a suggestion of what to plant over a tumbled-down stonewall that is located in part shade and receives some sun. Hummingbirds were on my mind, as later that afternoon I was planning to clean and to set out the hummingbird feeders, and immediately thought of our native honeysuckle. My very favorite variety, and a favorite of the Ruby-throated Hummingbirds, is Lonicera sempervirens x brownii "Dropmore Scarlet". "Dropmore Scarlet" is not accurately described by its name. The petals are not at all scarlet colored, but a singing shade of carmine on the exterior and golden yellow-orange on the inside. Carmine is that gorgeous color halfway between rose red and vermilion. Situated throughout our garden are several mature plants of ‘Dropmore Scarlet’ and during the growing season our mama hummingbird makes her daily rounds — morning, midday and at dusk — nectaring from the blossoms of honeysuckle, bougainvillea, and annual cardinal climber. I am so enamored of Lonicera sempervirens that we tucked in several other cultivars. It is not fair to compare the hummingbird-attracting potency of these newly planted varieties to our more mature "Dropmore Scarlet" just yet as they are only a foot high. I can, however, attest to the late-blooming trait and the hummingbird attractiveness of "Major Wheeler." There is a specimen growing around back of the nursery at the New England Wild Flower Society that is several stories tall. In the brief moment that I was there purchasing several honeysuckles for a design client, I noticed their stunning "Major Wheeler" was still flowering, and three hummingbirds were spotted.

Lonicera sempervirens, also called coral and trumpet honeysuckle, is a twining or trailing woody vine that is deciduous in New England, hardy in zones four through ten, and is very drought tolerant. Trumpet honeysuckle is not at all fussy about soil. Plant it in full sun to partial shade. If trumpet honeysuckle becomes large and ungainly, prune hard to the ground — it grows very quickly and a vigorous pruning will only encourage more flowers.

"Major Wheeler" purportedly flowers the earliest of the trumpet honeysuckles, and in a deeper red hue than that of the carmine of "Dropmore Scarlet". "John Clayton" is a cheery, cadmium yellow, a naturally occurring variant of Lonicera sempervirens, and was originally discovered growing wild in Virginia. The blossoms of "Mandarin" are a lovely shade of Spanish orange. I am not prepared to recommend "Mandarin" as the foliage looked ratty all summer. Foliage often looks poor initially after transplanting, so we will give it one more year in the garden.

Early blooms are an important feature for a vine planted to lure hummingbirds. You want to provide red to orange tubular-shaped flowers and have your hummingbird feeders hung and ready for the first of the northward-migrating scouts. If nothing is available, they will pass by your garden and none will take residence. Hummingbirds can easily distinguish red contrasting against green. We go so far as to plant vivid Red Riding Hood tulips beneath the hummingbird feeders, which hang from the bows of the flowering fruit trees. Although hummingbirds do not nectar from tulips, the color red draws them into the garden and the flowering fruit trees and sugar water provide sustenance for travel-weary migrants.

Lonicera sempervirens has myriad uses in the landscape. Cultivate to create vertical layers, in a small garden especially. Plant trumpet honeysuckle to cover an arbor, alongside a porch pillar or to weave through trelliage. Allow it clamber over an eyesore or down an embankment. Plant at least one near the primary paths of the garden so that you can enjoy the hummingbirds that will be drawn to its nectar-rich blossoms. I practically bumped into one last season as she was making her rounds. Did you know they make a funny squeaky sound? I began to take notice of their presence in our garden when at my office desk one afternoon in late summer, with windows open wide, I heard very faint, mouse-like squeaks. I glanced up from my work, fully expecting to see a mouse, and was instead delighted to discover a female Ruby-throat outside my office window, nectaring at the Cardinal Climber. Trumpet honeysuckle not only provides nectar for the hummingbirds, it also offers succulent berries and shelter for a host of birds.

End Note: The above mentioned cultivars of Lonicera sempervirens are available from the nursery at Garden in the Woods, which is the home of NEWFS, Corliss Brothers, Wolf Hill, and Weston Nurseries. Please check availability.

Andrew Motion Reads Poems from 'The Mower'

from Godine's forthcoming The Mower, by Andrew Motion