This is the final chapter of my adventure that began with the discovery that my library owned Howard Nemerov's annotated Advanced Review Copy of May Sarton's book of poetry, The Land of Silence and continued with my journey to Special Collections to look at it.

The next step was to see if Nemerov wrote and published a review of The Land of Silence. Since it was published in 1953, I tried a search of the MLA and LION databases but wasn't surprised to not find it.

Then I pulled out my textbook from Reference class, Reference and Information Services by Bopp and Smith, which sent me to a couple of indexes to book reviews. I learned something important about our reference collection at that point--reviews of books and other media are shelved separately from the rest of the indexes, even though the catalog gives no indication that is so. I was on my way to the Reference Desk to ask about them when I spotted them.

My answer was in the Book Review Digest. Nemerov did, indeed, publish a review of The Land of Silence in the September 1954 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Washington University owns that in print, in a bound volume for 1954 in the basement of the library.

It's a negative review, using her own poem, "Poets and Rain," against her. From the review:

And when, at the height, she says, "I stand, rapt with delight though deaf and blind, / And speak my poem," it is difficult not to agree that this or something like this is exactly the trouble.

The review is clever. I have no basis to judge the poetry. My problem with poems is that I usually don't understand them. That holds true for most of Sarton's poems, including the one that sent me on this journey, "Because What I Want Most is Permanence." Perhaps, I am like Nemerov in this. He complained about one of Sarton's poems that it "vastly puzzled my literal head." I did, like Nemerov, understand and appreciate the poem, "Humpty Dumpty." So, perhaps, there is hope yet for my poetry reading.

More importantly, since this all began with one of Sarton's memoirs, I am really enjoying Plant Dreaming Deep and, as a result of these blog postings, received a trusted recommendation for Sarton's next, and most famous, memoir, A Journal of Solitude.     #    (0) comments

2006-06-09

Keynote

The keynote speaker, Susan Singleton of CARLI, at the Mobius consortium conference quoted several times from Karen Schneider's meme/manifesto, The User is not Broken, from her Free Range Librarian blog. I see that I wasn't the only person this week to hear it brought up at a conference (Nicole Engard at What I Learned Today on the PALINET Regional Spring Meeting).

Susan Singleton noted that most of what librarians think of as big changes in our libraries are not noticeable to our users. She says to start asking ourselves, "does anyone outside of the library care?"

She had several points of advice--I think I got them all.

• Get over our sense of superiority. At best, we'll be patrons' collaborators.



• Realize that our frustration with vendors is partly our fault--what we have is what libraries wanted. Or, at least, it's what we wanted fifteen years ago.



• When designing systems, think like a 5-year old. I want it now. I want it done. I want something that is mine (customizable).



• Technology is a tool, not an end. Like a plastic serving spoon, it's going to break and we'll need another tool.



• Comfort ourselves that we did this to ourselves by defining, 30 to 40 years ago, that libraries are information places. But libraries have always been more than that. Library as place. Library as a point on a patron's path to knowledge and wisdom.



• Make sure we're not wasting time and resources on small changes--work on the things that someone outside the library cares about.



• Don't take ourselves too seriously. Deal with changes using humor.

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2006-06-05

A journey to Spesh

While researching the homes of May Sarton on the Internet, I learned that she wrote a poem called "Because What I Want Most Is Permanence" in the collection Land of Silence. So, I checked Wash U's library catalog to see if we had it. I love my library. Not only do we have a copy in the general stacks, we have, in Special Collections, Howard Nemerov's advanced review copy with his pencilled annotations!

So, guess what I did at lunch today? Even for a librarian, Special Collections is an intimidating place--its own country, with its own laws and regulations. No pens? Check! Hands clean and dry? Check! Prepared to follow all instructions including any involving gloves or unfamiliar tools like book cradles? Check! As a librarian, of course, I know that there will be friendly, helpful people in Special Collections to take care of me and anyone else who walks through the door.

As it turned out, I didn't need gloves but was given a foam book cradle to use with the book. The only other procedure that took me by surprise was that I needed to fill out their request form rather than just hand them the print-out of the catalog page. The request form, of course, included blanks about me as well as the item I requested--I assume that is so they know who handled what if a problem is discovered later.

The annotations consisted mostly of underlines and lines next to particular lines of poems. There was one question mark and one notation at the bottom of "Poets and Rain" that says "I fear it is but the simple truth." The gem ended up being the inside back cover with a kind of index, page numbers of the poems Nemerov wanted to refer to again. Some of these had very short notes including one for "Poets and Rain" that said "(do I dare?)". Wonder what that means. Another note, next to the page number for "Humpty Dumpty" says "best, I think."

So, the next step in this adventure is to figure out if Howard Nemerov ever wrote a review for this book and if he dared.     #    (0) comments

2006-06-03

Seeking Sarton

Update: fixed broken second link

At 4:30 pm yesterday, I was approaching the fourth and final half hour of a very slow Friday afternoon shift at the Reference Desk. Three questions on "where's this call number?" were the highlights of my shift. The other two questions were "where's the stapler?" and, from our student worker, "could you file a trouble ticket on this printer that keeps jamming?"

My email and my Bloglines feeds were caught up--staying current on these is proving to be one of the most useful aspects of having regular reference shifts--and I still had thirty minutes to go. So, I did the most librarianly thing I could think of: looked over the new reference books that our Reference Collection librarians had put on a book cart behind the desk for us.

That's how I came to read the entries for "diary" and "memoir" in the Encyclopedia of women's autobiography. Those entries reminded me that I've always meant to read May Sarton when I got a bit older, so I pulled out the second volume to read the Sarton entry.

Sarton's first second memoir, after several novels and volumes of poetry, was Plant Dreaming Deep. It's about being a woman in her mid-forties who has lost both of her parents and buys a house for the first time. Too many parallels with my life to resist. I started to request it from my public library, like I do most things that I intend to read for fun. Then I remembered that Wash U has a Women's Studies program. Sure enough, we have a large collection of Sarton, including Plant Dreaming Deep. After work, I checked it out on my staff card and this weekend I get to enjoy beautiful prose, charming black and white photos, and the occasional snippet of poetry.     #    (0) comments

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