Strange Bedfellows?

Maybe I was a reader, maybe I hadn't yet learned, when I believed that one book stuffed next to another on the shelf could talk to the other, interact, intermingle, contribute to each other. (I know now, and try to model as a teacher, that indeed each book you read can be built on another reading, that books commingle, but, darn, you have to pull 'em off the shelf and activate 'em.)

Imagine these conversations now occurring on my bookshelf:
William Blake's The Book of Urizen chatting it up with Paul Blackburn's The Cities. George Albon's Empire Life deep in conversation with Mark Strand's translation of Rafael Alberti's The Owl's Insomnia. I'm curious what does Alan Davies' Active 24 Hours has to say today to Dante's Inferno? Somehow I think the dialogue -- I hear chuckling -- between John Gardner's The Life and Times of Chaucer and Joseph Ceravolo's Spring In This World of Poor Mutts is not quite ready for primetime (even before Janet's Breast ((who's the first poet to claim that as title to a poem?))). And though they may speak a different dialect, reside in different times and places, I think Robert Hayden's American Journal just might have a lot to say to Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and vice-versa.

I'm delighted to see that some neighbors may not be so accidental, as if they gravitated to each other. In a row, I find Phillip Whalen, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams. Now there's a conversation I'd love to overhear. And I can barely keep the two of them on the shelves: Alice Notley frolicking with her neighbor Frank O'Hara.

Comments

[dooflow]

Jeez, I always felt dorky about those daydreams, sometimes I swear I could hear them. It's nice to know that I'm not the only total book nerd.