Saturday Suck: Poetry Bookstores Are Hazardous

There’s a very special Saturday Suck for you tonight. I’d love for you to come along for the ride and share my pain.

I went to a great bookstore today, Open Books in the Wallingford area of Seattle about a mile from my house. Cozy, classy, with subdued but sufficient lighting and every single book having to do with poetry in some way or another. I highly recommend the experience.

As I was thinking about the novelty of a bookstore specializing in just one kind of book, I remembered another, Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Cambridge, Mass. And that brought to mind something that’s bothered and confronted me for the past five years or so. 

At the time I frequented this place I was working about three blocks from it, at the Tower Records in Harvard Square. On lunch breaks sometimes I’d wander over and take a look at the place: a tiny thing hardly big enough for a lunch counter in a creepy-looking alley. I’d read about it even before I moved to Boston: it’s been around at least since the 1920’s because Ezra Pound and later T.S. Eliot would frequent the place during their time at Harvard. So already I’m predisposed to attribute some smoky, mystical power to it, something like the hatch in LOST.

It was pretty much the stereotype you’d find in some crappy indie movie about twentysomething writers falling in and out of love during grad school. Greenish flaking paint on the facade and three little steps to get into the store, very high bookshelves with dusty volumes crammed into every available space in little discernible order.  A single cash register with books piled willy-nilly onto it so the person manning the till had to peer over stacks to see the customer. 

They had quite a few rare editions and hardbacks that seemed to have been compiled by Duns Scotus or a Gutenberg apprentice, little chapbooks so faded you could hardly find the authors’ names and multi-volume Complete Sets nobody would actually read but would look just fantastic as the backdrop in an expository scene set in a country gentleman’s library.

And then in the middle of the store were some bargain bins with random crap just heaved in like so much unneeded ballast. That’s usually what I’d paw through to see if I could find some buried thing of value for a buck or two. Nearly all of it deserved to be thrown into that ignominious mass grave of pages but you never know.

The proprietor had purchased the store from a Grolier descendant about thirty years back, a small woman vaguely resembling Crazy Cat Lady from The Simpsons, complete with ratty-looking sweaters and frizzed-out hair. She barely looked at me when I came up to the counter, handed over a few bills and went on my way, except for once or twice gruffly demanding I give smaller change. The way I see it, you don’t purchase and preside over a run-down poetry store without being at least slightly unhinged, but she was harmless enough.

Then one day in the spring I walked in for my usual routine to get my hands grubby from some old paperbacks and take a chance on something new. As soon as I set foot in the door this old lady says loudly, “NO.” I look up, surprised, since this is the first time I’d ever seen her notice anyone coming into the place. I think I said, “I’m sorry?”

She said, “You can’t come in here. You took something.” I said, “But I just got here.” She said, “Last time you were in here you took some books. You can’t come in.” At first I couldn’t even figure out what she meant, it was too unfathomable. “You think I took something?”

“I saw you take it. Get out of here.” That’s when I started to get frustrated, and usually when I get frustrated I get more polite and condescending. “I most certainly did not. Can you tell me what exactly it is you think I took?” I can’t remember if her response was, “I don’t know,” or, “It doesn’t matter” but the effect was the same. Conversation over. I was banned.

It was her certainty that threw me off. It still does - she had this absolute belief that I had shoplifted a two dollar book from her bargain bin and then come traipsing back the next week to repeat the trick. I had to vacate the premises.

It was shocking. Over the years I’ve had courtesy and fair dealing beat into me. I am the world’s worst liar - my poker face can be read from forty paces by a visually impaired child. You can call me a lot of things and I won’t dispute you, but a thief? That’s just ludicrous.

I felt disoriented as I stumbled out the door, through the alley way and back into the sunshine on the street. I started to question myself: had I inadvertently taken something? I can get distracted and do dumb things like forget where I put my keys or look for my phone when it’s already in my pocket. Maybe I’d taken something thinking I’d already paid for it? 

Not a chance. It bothers me when I don’t have exact change for bus fare and I have to hold people behind me up for a second while the driver breaks a five. When I drive I can’t even seem to honk my horn at a near-collision because it just seems so impolite. There’s not the faintest possibility I would walk out of there with a book in my hands and not look at the back cover, flip through the preface. But it still bugs me.

I told some coworkers about it and they looked both horrified and amused at the thought of my taking something that wasn’t mine. My wife’s face went pale when she heard the story as though it was the worst thing she could imagine happening to a person. I wanted to get on my high horse, be the bigger man, show a little moral superiority. And that’s where things went off the rails.

I found two or three of the books I’d bought from there and took them with me to work the next day. On my lunch break I made a purposeful stride back to Grolier, tried to catch the lady’s eye through the window and deposited the books on her doorstep as if to say, “If you think I’m so unethical, how’s THIS for ethics? I wipe the dust off this store from my feet and give you back my purchased items.” I walked away, feeling pretty smug.

Then a little Jiminy Cricket voice piped up somewhere far back in my head: “How does she know you purchased those books?” Suddenly the whole scenario replayed from a different angle like the denouement of a bad sitcom where you see the events of the episode from the other point of view. To her, it would seem she’d been right all along: in guilt and remorse I came back to return my ill-gotten gain. I’d played right into her hands, confirmed her suspicions.

Panicking, blood rushing to my face, I ran back, kind of hunching along the wall where stacks of books in the windows partially hid me. I grabbed the items in question and beat a hasty retreat. It was pretty much the most incriminating, embarrassing move I could have made. Nice work, dum-dum.

And what do I have for it? A life lesson, a long blog post and this: “Bohemian Airs and other Kêfs” by Robert Anbian. 

(For you etymologists out there, kêf comes from the Arabic kayf which denotes “a state of dreamy tranquility.” Maybe it’s related to “khef” in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, similar in meaning to Robert Heinlein’s word “grok.” It may also be the root for the Russian slang word khaif which basically means “awesome” or “epic win.”)

Man, does that book suck. How bad, you may ask? Let me give you the full, unexpurgated “About the Author” back page. 

Robert Anbian is well-known as a “rather depressing character.” Nonetheless he finds himself in great demand among the ill-starred and ill-fated. Progeny of the last great war, Anbian early in life shook off his first-generation upward mobilities like so many leaves of lettuce. For memorabilia he clings only to a slender vial of brown mucous substance from the streambed of the Rancocas Crik into whose mud, eventually, he hopes to be stuck. “I learned a lot about life,” he claims, “from Bill Williams.” A notorious anti-American, Anbian once put out a pamphlet of poems entitled Rat. He was recently quoted out of context as saying that his ambition, “imbued” with “popular genius,” was, in this “sink” of “unreconstructed modernity,” to make his face “famous as far as the next room.”

Man, where to start? The gratuitous use of mysteriously sourced quotation marks? The poorly-disguised first/third person narrative of mock humility? The useless details about some random dude named Bill and the unique choice of title for his previous collection?

Or how about the fact that the picture of the author shows him confidently leaning against a wall of bland abstract paintings, arms akimbo, head cocked to one side and a Kabuki mask completely obscuring his face?

It actually gets worse from there. Here’s my favorite part of the Foreword, by one John Spilker:

For the critical grammar has not been found which might elucidate verse yet grant it that freedom which is its special medium. Here. Try on this face, or this. See what you become.

And then you get to the verses themselves. Try on this face, if you dare, see what you become, o ye of unelucidated critical grammar unfound and special medium freedom.

Postcard from a Voyage

Robert Anbian

The woman, without feather or friends,

cracks eggs in a stone-naked piazza

where noon arches its radiant/spine

of a cat: white-bred, an airey furr

before whose suffocating breast we dare not extol

our grimy knees, or the wealth of roaches

lest the clocktower descend

in its high leather boots.

This woman, without criminality or happiness,

is cruel. She is incognita,

filled with dread, a cat’s paw,

and my appeal not as I thought,

neither last nor as foolish

as a dog and its manner. Fear

is no longer my own. Our earth

trembles like an eggyolk on a stone,

here, where we have found, so far from now

pain and wonderment. Pain and

wonderment and a keen dying,

which is waiting silent in the womb, of a woman

or a long afternoon.

Tac tac tac, the eggshells open. Yet if a horseman

ride down I cannot arrest

him, nor his spurs of clear fumes.

Terra! Terra! enjoy me

and make of the woman

a motionless tree.

And yes, he spelled it “airey” like he’s Ben Jonson or something. 

I hope I’m not taking my aggravation and wounded sense of justice out on the man, but he seems like a dense, insufferable prick. Could the egg metaphor be spelled out any more patronizingly? And then the random details of the clocktower’s boots, some imaginary horseman and right in the nick of time, at the end, a tree. 

Maybe he’s being ironic, self-deprecating and in on the joke. I could see a cocksure wise-acre in 1982 deciding to puncture the pompous self-importance of the San Francisco poetry scene from decades past by taking those tendencies to their furthest extreme. But how big a difference is there between bad poetry and mock-bad poetry? If you can find me that dividing line I’ll happily concede the point.

It’s kind of like saying Captain and Tennille’s “Muskrat Love” is a parody of sappy ‘60s love songs. If there’s a quality that separates “Muskrat Love,” Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” and “I’m Into Something Good” by Herman’s Hermits, I haven’t been able to make it out. 

Fortunately for us all, Anbian now has a MySpace page where we can hear his verse stylings put to music, sort of like the theme music for "Mad Men" crossed with silky-smooth amateur jazz.

So there you have it - a little old lady who ran a poetry bookstore had it in for me. Looking at their website, it seems they’re under new management now. Maybe I can show my face there again if I’m ever out that way. 

Most likely I wouldn’t set foot in there if the top of my head had plasma burns and they offered me a bucket of water.