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Thursday 24 July 2014

Weeding through the personal library

So I've been going through the personal library in order to do a little downsizing, to get an unwieldy book collection into better order.  A necessary task - one that we've had to do repeatedly as we've had to move a number of times over the years because of school and work - but it does inspire a certain quality of dread. 

After all, books aren't just papers bound with cardboard or cloth, they're memories.  Our experiences with books go beyond the experience of reading the words on the page.  Books resonate with our total reality. When I leaf through, say, Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn, I'm not only reminded of the book itself and what I liked and disliked about it, scenes that I remember, the way that it informed my thinking (informed my experience of literature, my experience of other books), but I'm also reminded of what life was like when I was reading it.  

For example, I recall carting Capricorn around with me back and forth across Toronto during a very hot July in the late 1990s, reading it in coffeeshops, on subways, on the futon couch of my apartment in the wee hours of the morning when it was too humid to sleep. These memories might seem unexceptional - and I admit they are unexceptional - but it was a time in my life:  Tropic of Capricorn was woven into my experience of that July and my experience of that July is woven into Tropic of Capricorn.   

As I weed through the book collection, holding the books in my hand one at a time, these kinds of moments and memories come to mind, making it hard to put some books in the "TO GO" pile even if I didn't really like the book--which was the case with Miller's Capricorn.  In short, this is the book-lover's dilemma. 

Thursday 3 July 2014

An open field

Just back from a trip to Ireland and I'm dipping and redipping into the works of Ireland's finest: Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, to name just a few.  

Thinking of Ireland's literary history, it strikes me how difficult it would be to be a young Irish poet, to have to contend with such a weighty past of wonderful, powerful poets such as Yeats, such as Heaney.  A young Irish poet would really have to absorb the works of Yeats and Heaney and somehow position themselves in relation to them--not an easy task, I think.  

Do young Canadian poets have the same problem? There are few Canadian poets whose legacy makes the same demands as Yeats' and Heaney's legacies. Yes, certainly Irving Layton had been nominated for the Nobel Prize, but it's easy to imagine a whole host of younger poets writing today who pay his work very little mind.  They don't really need to contend with him.  

Don't get me wrong: This isn't CanLit bashing (a terrible thing to do in the wake of Canada Day). We do have writers who need serious consideration.  Younger Canadian poets who fancy themselves nature poets do have to seriously think about the poetry of Don McKay, for instance--and that wouldn't be an easy task either.  

What I mean is this: it seems to me that the field is open, the possibilities are there, the past doesn't make the same heavy demands.