What would William Blake have made of the Kindle, I asked myself the other morning during a private viewing of the Artists’ Book Collection at Southern Connecticut State University’s Buley Library. According to Tina Re, curator of the eighty-book collection, it was Blake who created the first artist’s books when he and his wife, Caroline, wrote, illustrated and bound books such as Songs of Innocence and Experience. Their venture beyond authorship into design, self-publishing and self-distribution remain hallmarks in the realm of artists’ books today.







“The artist’s book can be purely visual or text, one of a kind or an edition,” Re says, as we walk among tables of books as fans, venetian blinds, flags, accordians, and origami structures, to name a few. “It can take the form of the traditional codex – the book as we know it today, with binding on one side and pages in progression on the other side – or many others. Whatever the case, it’s very much about the artists having control over every aspect of the book.”

Wavy-haired and bespectacled, Re (rhymes with “Fey”) displays the quiet intensity you would expect from a Special Collections librarian. Under constant state budget constraints, she’s been amassing this collection for only three years. It serves mainly as a multi-disciplinary teaching collection for faculty and students, and is presently available to the public largely through private arrangement.

We stop at a book called Aunt Sallie’s Lament, a collaboration between poet Margaret Kaufman and Claire Van Vliet of Janus Press. The words of a Southern quilter printed on thick, colored uniquely-shaped pages that layer and interlock with each other, the book is a harmonious blend of text, image, color, structure and craft.

Next we come upon a portfolio box housing Direction of the Road by Ursula LeGuin with Foolscap Press. It’s the story of an oak tree standing in the road, and is a limited edition artist’s book incorporating anamorphic art, first recorded in the west by Leonardo da Vinci in 1485 in a drawing in his Codex Atlanticus. An anamorphic woodcut of an oak tree, intentionally distorted on one axes, becomes proportionate when we view it through an included standing cylindrical mirror. The reflection of the oak tree provides a backdrop to the book itself, which is printed letterpress on white linen paper with fabric leaves pressed into the paper.

“Listen when you read,” Re says to me. And as I turn the pages, the linen paper rustles, like leaves in a breeze. It feels as if we are standing directly below the tree.

I am hooked. I fully comprehend the urge to create a book in its whole, not just as author, but as designer, illustrator, papermaker, typographer, photographer, printer, illustrator, calligrapher, and bookbinder.

Re said that she had similar responses after a recent open house of the collection. Students came up to her demanding to know more about bookmaking and printmaking, and talking about DIY, steampunk and the huge popularity of Esty.com, the site to buy and sell handmade items. It appears that this generation brought up on tactile-less text on the computer, cellphone and Kindle screen are starting to get back to the basics.

William Blake is surely resting easier in his grave.

Thinking about it now, I pause to think about the ramifications of moving from one new place to another over the past five years—from New York to New Haven and now to New Orleans. After years of banging around various locales in and around New York City, it wasn’t too long after I moved to the Elm that I was schooled by two locals on the question of emphasis when it comes to how you actually pronounce New Haven. New Yorkers, it seems, tend to put the emphasis on the NEW! and not the York. “I live in New York, not to be confused with Old York.” But here, as Ideat Village impresarios Bill Saunders and Nancy Shea counseled one night, repeatedly, the emphasis, generally speaking, is on the Haven. Not NEW! Haven but New HAAAY-VEN. After awhile I got it; you want to linger on the Haven a good long while, since it is a town that will grow on you. So I started emphasizing the Haven part of New Haven and was therefore able to live here for over four years.

When it comes to New Orleans, hey, I’m having a hard enough time pronouncing some of these street names without worrying too much about where the emphasis ought to lie. Post-Katrina you could argue for NEW! Orleans, but that sounds like Chamber of Commerce-approved marketing of the most vanilla-cynical variety. Besides, the blessed and endemic lassitude of the Big Easy begs for a lingering over the Orleans. On the other hand, from a fact-checking point of view, there is an Orleans with which one can make a differentiation. So I have been worrying about it, but not too much.

The other day I was walking in the Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans, which, I have learned, is not pronounced “ma-RIG-knee,” and came upon one of those those Volvo sub-wagons you see in every town, festooned with an abundance of bumper stickers citing various locales, pols and causes. Amid the Hillary! Stop War! and Peace is Patriotic stickers was one trumpeting the glories of … New Haven!—complete with an accompanying icon, a slice of pizza. The nudgenik in me thought, “Hey, that’s wrong! None of the legendary places in town sells pizza by the slice! Outrages!”

But seeing that bumper sticker, indeed the whole trove of them, did evoke yet another question of where to put one’s emphasis, this time when it comes to the old canard, “Everything in moderation.” It’s one on the great cautionary aphorisms of all time, but that’s only because most of us put the emphasis on the moderation. Embedded within lies the stunning and deeply gratifying notion that if you can swing the moderation, you can have everything!

And so there we were, the winter of 2008, myself and Bill and Nancy, and the writer Todd Lyon. By then I knew how to tell people I lived in New Haaaay-ven and it had stopped bothering me that my friends from New York would always want to know how I was enjoying Hartford. In any case, we had an agenda. Oh, such a one as it was! We would hit four pizzerias in one night. We’d start at Zuppardi’s in West Haven, get the double-dose at Sally’s and Pepe’s, and then grab a capper pie at Modern.

A slice here, a slice there, no gastro-problems would ensue if we paced ourselves; that was the plan. Alas. Immoderation won out in Wooster Square and we never made it to Modern. As for BAR, we kept it off the list. Too new, relatively speaking, to qualify for the tour.

A Short Tribute to Selected Artiness I Remember from the 1980s, and a Hearty Recommendation of a Novel by Eric Kraft

When I was in high school, someone—I have no idea who—went around town putting up posters that said “New Haven is the Paris of the 1980s.”

This was completely untrue, but it just slayed me and my friends. Every few years or so, I end up in a conversation with someone who was around then, and we go, “Remember the ‘New Haven is the Paris of the 1980s’ guy? Who the hell was that?” and then we laugh and have another beer.

In the 1990s I read all the available work by the sadly underrecognized literary genius Eric Kraft. I’d read his Herb n’ Lorna, fallen madly in love with it, and begun to eat my way through the rest of his books. The one I liked best, and which is probably still my second favorite, is called Reservations Recommended. It is a sad comic novel (I know that sounds impossible, but trust me, it isn’t) about a guy who lives a boring life working for a big company, but has an alter ego who is a restaurant critic in Boston. A lot of the novel is this guy’s observations about Boston in general, and many of those observations focus on someone he calls the Neat Graffitist. The Neat Graffitist, actual identity unknown, goes around Boston neatly magic markering the town with random statements, “in small, precise capital letters,” such as:

NEVER FEAR PAIN. TIME DIMINISHES IT. BUT AVOID BOSTON CITY HOSPITAL. NURSES THERE WEAR USED UNIFORMS PURCHASED FROM BURGER KING, TREAT PATIENTS WITH FATALISTIC DETACHMENT.

There are many parts of Reservations Recommended that I reread with deep pleasure, just reveling in the wonderfulness of it, but the words of the Neat Graffitist are some of my favorite parts of the book. My husband and I are especially fond of this one:

TO HERBERT: YOU WERE BORN ONCE AND NOT TWICE AND WHEN YOU ARE DEAD YOU WILL BE DEAD FOREVER. GIVE ME BACK MY WATCHES. THEY WILL NOT MAKE YOU HAPPY. THEY ARE NO DEFENSE AGAINST DEATH.

The Neat Graffitist belongs in a category, I feel, with the “New Haven is the Paris of the 1980s” creator, along with the person who spent time writing pithy little sweet nothings on masking tape and putting them on parking meters around downtown around 1984–85. I vividly remember strolling around downtown with a friend who noticed this and chortled: “Uh-oh—someone’s getting arty with the parking meters.” It was almost certainly a Yalie, but still pretty entertaining.

So whoever the “New Haven is the Paris of the 1980s” guy (or, okay, girl) is, thanks and hats off to him/her; also to the Masking Tape Artist of 1984. Where are you now? Do you even remember doing these things?

Meanwhile, Eric Kraft’s been getting rave reviews for his recent fiction, but it’s not likely you’ve actually acted on your fleeting thought, “Gee, I should pick that up sometime and read it.” Listen to me. Start with Herb n’ Lorna if you can; if you can’t, with Reservations Recommended. Act on the fleeting thought. Fleeting thoughts are our friends.

Aside from intellectual property attorneys, who really knows where to get good movie ideas? Julie & Julia, due in theaters this August, is Nora Ephron’s movie of Julie Powell’s memoir (originally a blog) of the year she devoted to making every recipe in Julia Child’s famous cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Starring Amy Adams as Powell and Meryl Streep as Child, it is said to be the first wide-release movie developed from a book developed from a blog developed from a cookbook.

And it just goes to show that potential entertainment properties are lurking everywhere. What most interests me, though, is its implied confidence in the supremacy of storytelling. If this film succeeds, it might inaugurate a whole new cinematic subgenre of movies dramatizing the doing of things described in instructional books.

Is an adaptation of Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why finally at hand? If so, what would it require? Perhaps the enterprising screenwriter might invent some twenty-something everyman, poised on the brink of self-actualization, and cross cut his intellectual development with telling formative vignettes from the life of Bloom?

Already I can picture our young, book-addled hero, sitting in an uncomfortable chair and contemplating “the vagaries of our current counter-Puritanism,” with the camera swirling and the music swelling around him; or standing by his apartment window, gazing out into the dusk and bearing in mind that “Irony will clear your mind of the cant of the ideologues, and help you to blaze forth as the scholar of one candle.” It began with Jason Schwartzman in contention for the part, but now I’m seeing Michael Cera.

So OK, it’s looking like this will be a Ron Howard picture, dumbed down just enough for mainstream safety and perhaps controversial in its casting of Tom Bosley as Bloom (certain members of the blogorati having lobbied in vain for Martin Landau). A box-office success? Maybe. An Oscar magnet? Well, sure, as long as it gets across the notion that “We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.”

And if that doesn’t work out, there must still be a good movie to be made from How to Complain for Fun & Profit: The Best Guide Ever to Writing Complaint Letters, by Bruce Silverman. Or at least from The Garden Primer, by Barbara Damrosch.

It is common to hear that part of what contributed to victory in World War II, and the overwhelming sense that it was the right thing to do, was that nobody at home knew how awful it was for the soldiers fighting it abroad. For many years now, books, essays, and movies have been editing the popular story about the war, revealing its singular brutality and the myriad of motivations that led the powers that be to fight it as they did. This has led to a bit of a crumbling of World War II’s image as America’s last good war, due to both those hoping to complicate its simple popular moral equation and those hoping to give a clearer picture of just what the soldiers’ sacrifice entailed.

Yet the idea that, from 1939 to 1945, the people were sheltered from the war’s horrors persists—an idea that I found myself questioning when I read Ernie Pyle’s Brave Men, a collection of the war correspondent’s dispatches from 1943 to 1944, when he covered the war in Italy and then the Allied push through France to Berlin. The 1944 edition of the book is a fascinating artifact of the time period: Along with the copyright, an eagle-emblazoned seal states that this is a Wartime Book: “books are weapons in the war of ideas,” the sash fluttering from the eagle’s beak proclaims. The seal goes on to state that “this complete edition is produced in full compliance with the government’s regulations for conserving paper and other essential materials,” and it’s easy to see the result: It’s printed on very thin paper (that nonetheless has held up remarkably well—even wartime cost-cutting seems to have produced a better-quality book than today’s mass-market paperback printers do) and with a clear regard for cramming as much text onto the page as possible without rendering it illegible. For me, a grandchild of those who lived through World War II, the effect of the book is to recall the stories I’d heard of who in my family served in the war, what they did, and where; and also, what the lives of the women who stayed behind were like, waiting for their husbands to come home, raising small children who had no recollection of their fathers.

Pyle, like the cartoonist Bill Mauldin, is celebrated for his honest yet dignifying depictions of the soldiers that he met, and Brave Men certainly gives you a lot of that. But Pyle’s vision of the war does more than that: By giving us what he saw in Europe at the height of combat, and by making the soldiers he met human—naming them, talking about the meals he shared and the combat he experienced with them—Pyle undermines the idea of World War II, or any war, as good. Consider his description of an air battle he witnessed from the ground:

Someone shouted that one of the planes was smoking. Yes, we could all see it. A long faint line of black smoke stretched straight for a mile behind one of them. And as we watched there was a gigantic sweep of flame over the plane. From nose to tail it disappeared in flame, and it slanted slowly down and banked around the sky in great wide curves, this way and that way, as rhythmically and gracefully as in a slow-motion waltz. Then suddenly it seemed to change its mind and it swept upward, steeper and steeper and ever slower until finally it seemed poised motionless on its own black pillar of smoke. And then just as slowly it turned over and dived for the earth—a golden spearhead on the straight black shaft of its own creation—and disappeared behind the treetops. But before it was down there were more cries of, “There’s another one smoking—and there’s a third one now.” Chutes came out of some of the planes. Out of some came no chutes at all. One of white silk caught on the tail of a plane. Men with binoculars could see him fighting to get loose until flames swept over him, and then a tiny black dot fell through space, all alone.

Or his description of soldiers approaching a firefight:

The men didn’t talk amongst themselves. They just went. They weren’t heroic figures as they moved forward one at a time, a few seconds apart. You think of attackers as being savage and bold. These men were hesitant and cautious. They were really the hunters, but they looked like the hunted. There was a confused excitement and a grim anxiety on their faces.

They seemed terribly pathetic to me. They weren’t warriors. They were American boys who by mere chance of fate had wound up with guns in their hands, sneaking up a death-laden street in a strange and shattered city in a faraway country in a driving rain. They were afraid, but it was beyond their power to quit. They had no choice. They were good boys. I talked with them all afternoon as we sneaked slowly forward along the mysterious and rubbled street, and I know they were good boys. And even though they weren’t warriors born to the kill, they won their battles. That’s the point.

He goes on to describe all of them—their names, their addresses, and a epigram about them that makes them suddenly, startlingly real (“his New England accent was so broad I had to have him spell out ‘Arthur’ and ‘Auburn’ before I could catch what he said”; “Eddie was thirty, he was married, and used to work in a brewery back home; he was a bazooka man, but his bazooka was broken that day so he was just carrying a rifle.”). Always giving them their dignity.

I like to think it was this dignifying impulse, and not the work of censors, that made Pyle use a kind of synecdoche when he described the beaches at Normandy just after the fighting was over. He lets the soldiers tell you what the actual assault was like themselves, the things that happened to them then, but he never pretends he was there with them. And when he takes a walk along the beach himself, he tells us that “men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead.” But he lingers much longer on the mangled machinery, “empty life rafts and soldiers’ packs and ration boxes, and mysterious oranges,” and at last, “in a jumbled row for mile on mile were soldiers’ packs.” He goes on:

There were socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles, hand grenades. There were the latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out—one of the security precautions enforced before the boys embarked.

There were toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. There were pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody, abandoned shoes. There were broken-handled shovels, and portable radios smashed almost beyond recognition, and mine detectors twisted and ruined.

There were torn pistol belts and canvas water buckets, first-aid kits, and jumbled heaps of life belts. I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it, and put it in my jacket. I carried it a half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don’t know why I picked it up, or why I put it back down again.

There are other things he sees that day, ironic and funny and pitiful and heartbreaking. And though Pyle himself never questions why they fought—if no war is good, fighting against Nazi Germany was certainly just—the overwhelming impression you get from the soldiers is that they’re just trying to do their jobs and then get back home. If they believe in the cause, it’s not so much for the lofty reasons that came out of the mouths of politicians, but because what they went through damn well better have meant something.

I teach 8th grade English here in New Haven. And when I taught my 8th graders Emily Dickinson’s “A little madness in the spring” it was a little joke to myself. I knew they would be bonkers as soon as it started to get sunny and humid. I knew we would be pushing our homeroom, communal deodorant spray on more than one of them, and I knew I would find them lying on the grass during recess, loafing around with each other. I wanted them to use the poem to justify themselves, as a smart way of saying ‘let us be.’ But here’s the thing. The joke is on me. There is something inside these teenagers that is positively popping. They are taking their newly-over-one-hundred-pounds bodies and they are pawing all over each other. This is what Dickinson calls “wholesome even for the King.”

For summer reading, I assigned Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. In it, Alexie paints a portrait of a ninth grader named Junior, growing up on the Spokane Reservation. Junior is smart and a self proclaimed “weirdo.” He chooses to go off the rez for a better education. The better education, as is often the case, is at a rich, white suburban school over 20 miles away. Naturally, Junior becomes a traitor to his community on the rez, and is ostracized as the token Indian at Reardan, his new school. His people call him an apple-red on the outside and white on the inside. The outsider idea is nothing new to adolescent fiction, but what stands out in this book is Alexie’s signature, candid wit, and Ellen Forney’s illustrations.

For all of his hardship, Junior is saved by the cartoons he draws. And the cartoons make the book; it’s sprinkled with hilarious caricatures cataloging his father’s alcoholism, his best friend’s abusive father, and his sister’s death. His self-deprecation and optimism in the cartoons pull the reader along through a thoroughly weighty and grievous narrative. And Junior says of his cartoons, “I take them seriously. I use them to understand the world…Sometimes I draw people because they’re my friends and family. And I want to honor them.” Words often fail him and cartoons don’t.

Lately, my students have been coming to class early to draw pictures on the chalkboard. A colleague enlightened me recently by giving me a few Maxine Greene essays on “esthetic education” wherein the use of art as a means of expression, inspiration, and invigoration in a classroom is seen as instrumental to better and more holistic learning. So, I always let them draw. Yet again, my students (and Junior) teach me. They already knew that drawing- making pictures of narratives is essential to their learning.

We are reading Lord of the Flies. Of course they have some ideas to process through pictures: Jack just stuck a pig in last night’s reading! Golding is forever alluding to the “essential human illness” that we all understand but can’t totally articulate-especially when suffering from heat stroke, or puberty. Lord of the Flies discussions have been markedly focused and engaged; the novel is moving them. How does the elusive and present human illness make sense to these 8th graders? They draw it.

Their drawings, which take up the full length of the board, are the boys-in tattered clothing (or naked-no sniggering!) and the pigs, and always a special focus on the boy with the “mulberry birthmark” on his face, whose only real mention in the novel is that he is noticed to have disappeared. He is a lost boy, gone, early on in the novel. My students can’t seem to forget him; they draw him everyday. (And not just because he had a birthmark.) But, I think because they want him to be remembered in the midst of the maddening cries of the novel. Because they wouldn’t want to be forgotten.

As Junior says, “I draw because I want to talk to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me.”

So I am thinking that a little madness in the spring on all absolutely true accounts is teaching me that my students are reflecting and processing this novel in their doodling. It means something to them, and they want to honor it, even if they can’t necessarily write a thesis paper on it-yet. I am thankful that they are getting it out, and the antecedent of ‘it’ is madness, wholesome, and tremendous.

I am pretty lucky. I am a science writer who, from my home office not too far from Wooster Square, gets to write about topics like giant, gassy planets that would float in a bathtub—if only there existed a bathtub large enough. I recently felt the Nerd’s Elation—an internal, rising giddiness—when I asked an astronomer about how, exactly, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy ejected a gang of rogue stars from the Milky Way. My current fixation is graphene—one-atom-thick sheets of carbon that look like teeny tiny honeycombs and will profoundly influence the future of electronics in one way or another.

All that to say, I usually write about things either far away—or very small. Last year, the good people at the New Haven Review let me take a welcome detour from the world of exoplanets, metamaterials and deep-space cannonballs. For Issue #3, I wrote about how Elm City artists responded to the demolition of the Veteran’s Memorial Coliseum, a colossal hulk that stood at one end of downtown New Haven like a neglected barbarian. I finished the story in the summer, and the issue was published in the fall.

Thus, the article was done. But that wasn’t the end of the story. The following sentence may be a tired truth, but it’s a truth nonetheless: most stories are never finished. You just stop working on them.

After I finished the piece about the Coliseum, I still had loads of information—bookmarks, postcards, pictures, tattered photocopies with illegible scribbles—I hadn’t used. I kept coming across architectural factoids and images that seemed interesting. Not all of these bits were Coliseum-centric. By the time Issue #3 went to press, the Coliseum had started to seem like one minor player in a long and complicated story about New Haven’s tangled relationship with architecture. But I was hooked: I had begun to pay attention.

In an effort to finally put this story and all of its tangents to rest, I’d like to offer just a few of these tidbits and highlight a couple more Elm City artists who have may or may not have had anything to do with the Coliseum.

• The firm of Roche Dinkeloo designed the Coliseum, and Archinect.com has an interview with Kevin Roche about his approach to architecture in general and the Coliseum in particular. Roche’s answers are heady but accessible. A photo essay about the Coliseum accompanies the interview. Under one of the photos of the gutted behemoth, there’s this lovely quote that I would have loved to include in my article: “Monsters are born too tall, too strong, too heavy: that is their tragedy.” Ishirō Honda (Director of Gojira, 1954).

• Man oh man, do I like looking at pictures of the Elm City through the lens of Christopher Gardner’s camera, and I’m sure he’s got pictures of the Coliseum somewhere. Karyn Gilvarg, New Haven’s city planner, tipped me off to his work while I was fact-gathering for the Coliseum story. Gardner’s pictures—some of which show up in the latest edition of Yale’s alumni magazine—are vivid and rich. On his web site, he’s got outtakes from that photo shoot, and they make New Haven look like a million bucks. The other thing I appreciate about Gardner’s site is his blog. He provides know-nothings like me a window into his process. He explains why that laptop is about to fly off Yale’s Art and Architecture building, and why he later had to take that laptop apart.

• Painter Charles Santarpia exhibited some paintings at the Hull’s Framing store downtown, right where Church becomes Whitney, last summer. Santarpia’s paintings stopped me because they looked like the Elm City by way of Edward Hopper. And yeah, he’s got a Coliseum picture or two. On his web site, you can see his rendering of the Anchor Bar, the reflection of City Hall in the Chase Bank building, and the Smoothie underwear factory condos, among other local haunts. And I do mean haunts. Santarpia’s paintings are a little spooky—but hey, they’re familiar. Maybe I am one of those people who don’t dance if they don’t know who’s singing.

So that’s what I’ve found. What/whom have I missed?

D.A. Powell’s reading late March, at St. Anthony’s Hall in New Haven, was subdued, offering the stringent lyricism of his poems in a quiet, undemonstrative manner. The week before, in a poetry reading group at Yale, we had kicked around a selection of poems culled from all Powell’s published volumes; from that brief introduction, I had the impression that the poems in Chronic (2009; Graywolf Press) were the best of his career thus far.

After the reading, while getting a copy of the book signed, I mentioned that to Powell and asked if the book had been well-received. A little bemused, he said it had gotten some unfavorable reviews—later, I came across a review on Poetry’s website where Jason Guriel takes Powell to task for “easily attained opacity” and the “fashionable gestures” of contemporary poetry. The enumerated failings that Guriel finds in Powell’s verse might well apply to an entire cohort of poets of our day, but I can’t see the reason in laying that at Powell’s door so specifically. It’s as if Guriel simply needed a whipping-boy and Powell, highly praised in other quarters, could sustain the attack better than most. Guriel, it seems, is in search of “stylistic tics” that might still seem “risky,” and accuses Powell of stock footage “filmed on modernism’s backlot,” as though an achieved style were simply something readily available and thus overly familiar.

About Powell’s reading, I’ll just say that I don’t think he presented the best of the book. My feeling was that the poems we read for the group were better chosen than those he elected to read. For instance, the poem “Republic,” with its litany of diseases and health issues, seemed to fall a bit flat in the reading. And Powell didn’t read the somewhat longish title poem of the collection which struck me as a standout of the selection we read in the group. The best moment of the reading was in the excellent paired poems that conclude the volume, “Corydon & Alexis” and “Corydon & Alexis, Redux.” Powell ended his reading with them, and there was a breathless intensity in the room as he finished.

oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself
how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god’s own ribs

If you’re of Guriel’s mind, you might believe the Eliot Waste Land crib is ersatz modernism (“you who are young, consider Phlebis”), that time personified as a banker foreclosing on us is a bit obvious, even if effective, and that the choice of a verb phrase like “deranges itself” is deliberate poeticizing. In fact, what I like about Powell is his willingness to poeticize in this register: using allusions, flippant or witty similes, somewhat off-putting word choice. I found myself having to listen pretty intently, while reading his poems to myself, to catch, again and again, a very deliberate music that, in his reading, was even easier to miss: “forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god’s own ribs”—the course of the o bouncing through the entire line, set-off nicely against short and long i. At his best, Powell’s mastery of such music is woven effortlessly into his poems so that it constantly teases the ear while reading.

In “Chronic,” this tendency is pushed to its fullest development. The lines, collected into irregular stanzas, seem almost to float in space, notational, not quite connected to the preceding lines but by a certain intonation, a kind of implied affective relation that sustains interest both as mood and as a train of thought. The poem looks back at a life spent becoming a poet, sketching recollections of sex, spring (“in a spring of misunderstanding, I took the cricket’s sound”), loving and sensual details (“sprig of lilac, scent of pine”) that are also fused with remorse and foreboding (“daily, I mistake—there was a medication I forgot to take”) to create a richly textured portrait held in time—static, and chronic: “light, light, do not go / I sing you this song and I will sing another as well.”

I hope Powell will continue to sing songs so well as those collected in this at times difficult, elliptical, but always intriguingly lyrical volume.

I like to tell this story, having told it many times before.

Sitting at home, I receive a call from a friend asking if I had seen that week’s copy of Business New Haven, for which she then worked.

“No, I haven’t. Why?”

“Well, there’s an interesting article about this guy who started a local book review, like the one you and I thought about doing years ago.”

And, lo and behold, so it was. Where I no more than dreamt, another made happen. Thus was the New Haven Review of Books born. Fortunately, for me, its founder was also a fellow synagogue member. So when he entered the lobby doors, child and stroller in hand, I approached him.

“I saw the article about the New Haven Review of Books. I’d like to help.”

“Oh, that’s great,” he replied. “Do you write?”

Do I write? That was a tough one, actually. “Sure, I write a little, but I’d rather be your publisher”—if you’ll have me—I thought parenthetically. I had served as the publisher of a Jewish literary journal in graduate school and I wanted to return to that more distinctly literary scene after years in library reference publishing.

“Our publisher? You mean like sales and marketing and stuff like that…”

“Yes, stuff like that.”

“Great! No one else wants to do that!”

Thus was a partnership born, and I was joined at the literary hip to an editorial collective of individuals wiser and more talented than myself—and with infinitely better connections, too.

But this was all fine by me. I like the business of publishing, from handling the filthy lucre to freaking out over missing a print deadline. True that in this endeavor I would have less occasion for the give and take of reading and responding to the lucubrations of the published and hoping-to-be-published. But would it be all too sickening to admit that I like fiddling with our circulation database, hounding subscribers for renewals, holding out my greasy palm for potential contributions, even filling out the occasional nasty legal form? Probably, but what can I say? I love it.

Publishing, for me, is in the blood—all aspects of it, from correcting misplaced commas to panhandling in the street for new readers.

So, ready to subscribe?

On Saturday night at the house of Debby Applegate and Bruce Tulgan we rolled out issue #4. It was a seriously good time, although I fear I made myself look like a dunce talking into John Spalding’s little Flip — I remember saying something about how the Paris Review may have more subscribers, but I have better hair than its editor. Which I don’t think is even true; from what I can tell in photographs, Philip Gourevitch actually has a nice head of hair.

I think I can sum up the party by saying that both NY Times deputy editor Jill Abramson and Moira Darling, one of Brooklyn’s premier knitters (she owns Advanced Knit-Design), were both there. Also spotted: gonzo science writer Carl Zimmer (also with good hair, salt-and-pepper), memoirist Roya Hakakian (fabulous hair), journalist and master writing pedagogue Fred Strebeigh (legendary beard), New Republic critic Alexander Nemser (precocious beard), award-winning science writer Jenny Blair, memoirist and NHR board member Pang-Mei Chang (her hair is the stuff of urban legend), NHR contributor Sarah Borden (her great hair is the least of her attributes).

Lest I forget: novelist Rudolph Delson, short-story writer Liz Edelglass, condom blogger Jonathan Oppenheimer, noted chemist Frank Torre, historian Kirk Swinehart, literature scholar Nicole Fluhr, Australian Lee Faulkner, and man-about-town Josh Safran.

At some point after the gin kicked in I was talking to somebody about Gay Talese’s essay about the Paris Review in its 1960s, Plimpton-edited glory days. As I remember the essay, Talese’s main point seems to be that while Plimpton, Mathiessen, and the others had some talent — especially for spotting other talent — their main genius was for creating community. Largely this was about parties at Plimpton’s place (where, Talese reports, women were treated like so much furniture), but more generally it was about using a magazine as the centerpiece of a world. As I was speaking these words last night, I realized — or hoped — that I could have been talking about NHR, right down to the middling talent of us editors.

Or such, at least, is the delusion-producing quality of gin.