Tag Archives: libraries

Sonnet: Ernest Hilbert, ‘Friends of the Library Sale’

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It’s fallen half apart, a derelict.
The gatherings have sprung, the boards detached,
The spine perished, folding maps cut out.
The title page is splotched with ink and nicked
At the edge, the author’s homely portrait scratched—
A splash of beer, faint thumbmarks all about—
Discarded once, but now it’s yours. It lives,
Like you, diminished now by age and loss.
And so, it brings the breeze, the autumn sun,
The creaking door that with a push still gives
The afternoon, the birds and clouds, grass, moss,
The world still new, the journey not begun,
The path curling from sight in the soft glow
Of a fading day—and you, prepared to go.

*****

Ernest Hilbert writes: “I am a rare book dealer, so I spend my days surrounded by books. I love all kinds of books, and I have a particular affection for books no one seems to want but which are, nonetheless, worthwhile. There are, after all, far more books than there are readers. When a book is taken home, adopted, as it were, it finds a new life. Each book one acquires is, in its way, a hedge against the future, a small hope one might some day find the time to read it. When a book is read for the first time, however old it is, however many times it has been read before, it becomes a new book. The structure of the poem is designed to express this sense of renewal and hope, the litany of degradation and wear, the sense of hopelessness, one finds in the octave redeemed, after the volta, in the sestet. 

“I intended to communicate that sense of excitement I still feel when I first open a book, but I likely also had in mind Benjamin Franklin’s mock epitaph, written when he was 22, which begins “The Body of B. Franklin Printer / Like the Cover of an old Book / Its Contents torn out . . .” Finally, I must admit that there are few places I find myself happier than at a promising friends of the library book sale.”

*****

‘Friends of the Library Sale’ was originally published in The Sonneteer.

Ernest Hilbert was born in 1970 in the city of Philadelphia and educated at Rutgers and Oxford Universities. He is the author of the poetry collections Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, Caligulan—selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize—Last One Out, and Storm Swimmer, winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize. He works as a rare book dealer in Philadelphia. Visit him at www.ernesthilbert.com

Photo: “Journey” by ~Matt LightJam {Mattia Merlo} is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Maryann Corbett, ‘To the Anti-Librarian’

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Small vandal, parked on your padded bum
on a cheerful rug in the Children’s Section
next to a bottom shelf,
yanking the volumes one by one
till they strew the aisle in every direction,
loudly pleased with yourself
at the way your brightly patterned havoc
obstructs the traffic,

keep to your task. Disrupting order
is evolution’s eternal purpose.
Surely it’s been your goal
from the hour two gametes burst their border
and two tame selves went wild as a circus.
Systems that once felt whole
eyeballed each other, laughed, and gambled,
and lives got scrambled.

Do your worst, then, with giggles, rage,
and all the smackdown-loud rebellion
grown-ups are now too tired for.
These sleepless two, in a golden age,
were a black-clad goth and a hard-rock hellion.
Change is the charge we’re wired for.
small changer, blessings. Though elders frown,
pull the world down.

*****

Maryann Corbett writes: “Like many poems, this one (first published in LIGHT) is part memory and part pure fiction. “Anti-librarian” was our joke term for our daughter as an infant when (long years ago) she sat on her tush next to the bookshelves and pulled the books off just because she could. The image of young parents as reformed characters is imaginary. The hope that the young will change the world seems to be eternal.”

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and six full-length collections, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry.

Picture: ‘Anti-Librarian’ by RHL and ChatGPT.

Potcake Poet’s Choice: Maryann Corbett, ‘The Vanished’

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 In the autumn of 2015, the production of paper cards for library catalogs ceased.

No matter how long ago they completed their disappearance,
I still expect them,
perhaps in a sort of narthex just past a pillared entry,
or off to the side
as if in a private chapel, or straight ahead like an altar.
Shrined in the silence,
modest and single, or ranged in ranks and banks and rows,
the gods of Order
lived in their tabernacles of honey and amber maple
or oak like chocolate,
darkened at times from the touch of a hundred thousand fingers.
On every drawer-front
the face of a tiny gargoyle waggled its brazen tongue out.
And so we pulled them.
And the drawers slid waxen-smooth, and the fingers flicked like a weaver’s
through card upon card,
and above the drawers were our faces, our heads all bobbing and davening.
A kind of worship
it was, with an order of service. A physical act of obeisance.
Its cloudy replacement
(perfect in plastic efficiency, answering almost to thought,
near-disembodied)
hurries us past the notion of order itself as a Being
worthy of honor.
So here I am, misplaced as a balky fourth-century pagan
mulling conversion,
but nursing doubts that the powers should be called from the general air,
seeking the numinous
still in its tent of presence, and longing to keep on clutching
the household gods.

Maryann Corbett writes: “This was one of those poems that spent several years stewing at the back of my brain as soon as I read the factoid that actually library catalog cards were no longer being produced. It’s a disappearance not likely to be noticed much by younger people, and I wanted to give it attention. What eventually let my brain’s stew boil over in images of all the card catalogs I’ve known, I can’t say. But it did so in a rush, a rush and roll that took the form of very long lines. I’ve written several other poems in hexameters–lines with six stresses–and I wanted to do something a bit different–and to leave space to breathe!–so I decided to alternate the hexameter lines with much shorter ones: dimeters, or two-stress lines.

 ‘The Vanished‘ appeared first in Alabama Literary Review, was anthologized in The Orison Anthology, Vol. II, and was included in my most recent book, In Code.“

Maryann Corbett lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where she worked 35 years for the Legislature. Poetry: Breath Control (2012), Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter (2013), Mid Evil (2014 Richard Wilbur Award), Street View (2017), and In Code (2020). Past winner, Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. Work included in The Best American Poetry 2018, as well as in the Potcake Chapbooks Families and Other Fiascoes and Robots and Rockets.

Photo: “Catalog Cards” by Travelin’ Librarian is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0