Being Square
Finally, after years of meaning to, I went to Open Books the other day and got the tour, which lasts about three seconds. Individual poets begin on the north wall (Angelou, Auden, Ashbery) and end in the middle of the south wall (the Williamses, Wright, Yates), and then come anthologies--shelved by theme, era, school. "So if you're looking for anthologies of Hungarian women's poetry," John Marshall said, "ask me and I can point you in the right direction."
Open Books, in Wallingford, is owned by Marshall and his wife, Christine Deavel, and has the distinction of being one of only two poetry bookstores in the country. (The other is in Cambridge, Massachusetts.) To cut down on costs, Marshall and Deavel are its only employees. (When I asked if they make any profit at all, Deavel said, "Oh, God, yeah," adding, "Quite frankly it's scarier to be a small general-interest bookstore these days because you're competing with the big boxes and with Amazon.com.") Open Books is a small box of a place--easy to miss among North 45th Street's busy, boxy storefronts--but its smallness is deceptive, given the inventory's definitiveness and depth.
When it comes to poetry, I have a general sense of tradition and the specific sense that I should by this point have already read a lot more Auden, but I weakly, stupidly, cling to what I know. So I went straight to M--attracted, I think, by the bloodyish new Marianne Moore collection, and, next to it, found tons of editions of earlier Moore collections, one an original from the '60s. Then my eye caught Heather McHugh's name and I let myself be distracted by Wesleyan University Press' unassuming 1988 edition of McHugh's Shades. I stood there and read the first poem, "20-200 on 747," which I've read again and again in other contexts, and thought it seemed different this time, more arresting, better, but I wound up buying Broken Languages, a book of McHugh's poetry criticism. (At Open Books, relevant scholarship are filed alongside each poet's work. Shades will be purchased on another visit; the photo on the back is of McHugh in a bathing suit.)
Is it bad that I go to a poetry bookstore and just buy more Heather McHugh, more Frank O'Hara? (On this visit: O'Hara's Lunch Poems and a chapbook of his short reviews in Art News from 1953-1955 called What's with Modern Art? I was tempted by but passed on his Art Chronicles: 1954-1966, which has his pieces on Pollock and Katz and his essay "How to Proceed in the Arts," full of advice like "Empty yourself of everything" and "If anyone is in bed with you, they should be told to leave.") I felt better about my tunnelish taste when a college kid came in and said that he had to buy any book of poetry for a class and that he liked Charles Simic; should he buy more by Charles Simic? I overhead Deavel telling him, "Well, if you like him, why not go with someone who speaks to you?"
