Zeldas's Inferno exercise: the last poem about books

Posted on: Sun, 10/03/2010 - 20:14 By: Tom Swiss

This week's Zelda's Inferno exercise: write a poem about books.

someday, maybe soon, someone will write
the last poem about books

(maybe this is it?)

a vanishing species perhaps
victim of shortened attention spans, digitization, and the pay-per-view revenue model

I cleaned my house this week
couldn't get through the clutter
until I sorted the books

here! the Beats, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder, Ferlinghetti
on the same shelf, other end, their forebearer Transcendentalists, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman

arrangement of volumes on the planks reflecting some
        relationships in my mind
so the physics and math books together here
the electronics books below them, next to home improvement,
        gardening, an old Boy Scout handbook
so it becomes theory here, practice here

front and center, the books chosen to show off, to make a
        statement to visitors
some religion and spiritualty, some literary fiction, a bunch of SF up
        on the top shelf, a bunch of graphic novels

no one will see the arrangement of your e-books
no scotch-tape to repair beloved old copies
no copies autographed by the author
no 100 year old copies, the yellowing pages, the out-of-style
        typography, the creaking cracking binding telling of the
        passage of time

the wabi-sabi of books will be lost to abstraction
the grittiness of the medium transcended by pure message

there is a beauty to that, too
but mess with my books and I will tear you like a page