Last week I had the pleasure of hearing the poet and Johns Hopkins English professor Allen Grossman read from his work. He is a thoroughly arresting speaker and reader, and appears at the University of Chicago this Thursday, November 18th. Highly recommended to you Chicagoans.
Here’s the poem I liked best in the reading, “Lending Library (Mpls. Xmas, 1943).”
At her Lending Library on Lake Street, Minnepaolis,
mother Beatrice rented out books to ladies.
But she read them first. That way she knew whether
there was not, or (better still) was, anything “disgraceful”
in any of the books. (There were two kinds of ladies.)
The result was mother owned the second and third volume
of many novels (e.g., Scott’s Ivanhoe), but not the first
which was gratefully taken to heart by her customers.
That’s why I know a lot about how things come out
and don’t know very much about how they begin.
But mother Beatrice (“B” for short) never read
the book called GOLDEN MEXICO (because
it was not to be loaned or sold)–until Xmas, 1943,
when a voice, out of the blue, said: “‘B,’ read that one.“
After she read it, “B” said: “How things look in the heart
of Jesus I don’t know and, frankly, don’t want to know.
But I do know that only those Jews who are stirred
by the question of their own existence can
answer the claim he makes…. Allen, my dear, who does
know? To whose sentence can we say, “Yes! That’s true“
–and add to the wonder of it belief.“
“Beatrice,” I asked her, “what do you really want to know?”
“Allen, what was the first book you ever read?”
“Beatrice, before I learned to read I could not read;
but I did know about reading, and it never happened
(thanks to you, for good or ill) that there wasn’t any book.
But I could not read in the heart of Jesus,
so the first book I read was GOLDEN MEXICO.
Now I read because light does not reveal itself
(not even on a bright wash day), but it lies hidden
in a cloud until summoned–like the heart.
It was the gold cover of the book named
GOLDEN MEXICO that drew me in at first. Then,
I added what I could add to that wonder.
No book I read was ever written until I added that.”
Outside the Lending Library, Xmas 1943, a voice–
maddening, relentless, phonographic–began to sing
“Silent Night,” and did not stop at “heavenly peace”
but started over, again, and again, and again.
It was the ladies’ triumph–a best seller,
a virgin birth, the babe who added to the
wonder of it all, belief. Three days of that
drove “B” crazy. Beatrice stood up, gathered her books,
and locked the door of her Lending Library. “Let them buy,”
she said. And her voice was heard, despite the singing,
across the gentile lake by itinerant Thoreau
where he rested on the far shore, high up the cliff
on a rock and caught the cold that killed him.
–There’s no Lending Library on Lake St., Mpls., any more.
How then ever know the way things begin,
remembering as we do nothing! None of our books
will tell, certainly not this one. But take the question
to heart, nonetheless, because I write the wonder of it all
and by the poem called LENDING LIBRARY solicit belief:
There was a road by which we came this way.
There is another by which we shall depart.