In the Upstairs Room

I’m sitting in the coffee shop of our small local bookstore as I write this. Yes, a small, local bookstore. A few of them still exist. This one is The Book Loft in Solvang, an independent shop owned by Kathy Mullins and operated by her and her staff, the kind of folks who are sincerely happy to help you or leave you to your browsing, either way.

One morning I walked in and there was Father Stacey leaning at the counter, his bicycle propped outside the door, chatting with Tom-from-Mississippi who works there, and they both looked up and said hello, and I joined the conversation and we all laughed about something, and that’s the way it is there. It struck me as so anachronistically small-town and Avonlea-ish that I breathed a sigh of relief and wondered, as I often do, at having somehow found such a place.

Last week I got a call from Ed Gregory telling me that there would be a poetry reading by Dan Gerber in the upstairs room Thursday evening, in case I was interested, which I was. Ed is a true bibliophile and he oversees the “used book” section of the shop, which is also upstairs, and that in turn is adjacent to an area that houses a tiny Hans Christian Anderson Museum. I suppose you could call the set-up quirky, but it works. There is something about climbing the stairs to the place above the main part of the store that feels secret and special.

And in the upstairs room people gather, sometimes for mundane meetings, but more often than not for readings by poets and authors. It is a wood-floored room with folding chairs, narrow windows, and a podium at the helm. It is always a little stuffy up there, and it smells like the nineteenth century, and the late afternoon sunlight slants in and imparts it with a sort of holiness somehow, but at the same time it is intimate and friendly.

I once read from my own book of essays in this room, and it was a wonderful experience, my fifteen minutes of fame. (If you go to that link, you have to scroll down a bit, but you'll see it, and if you look here you can read about my book, too, of which only a handful of copies remain: a limited edition indeed, maybe a collectors' item someday!)

But back to Dan Gerber. He is a highly regarded and well published poet, but he was modest and accessible, mingling with folks before he stepped up to the lectern and began not with his own words but with others’ thoughts on poetry and life, which sometimes seem to be quite the same thing. He spoke of the poet’s desire to capture the ephemeral moment, to translate, to be open "without partition" to the light of the stars. He quoted Rilke often, including this resonant line: It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again…

Then he read an assortment of his own wonderful poems: poems about sleepless nights, the bear on Main Street, death and a pineapple; poems about a dog, about childhood, about writing, about “waiting only for a little light from an already burning fire.”

Go ahead: google Dan Gerber. You'll find some of his poems online. 

Before concluding, Gerber offered up a few lines from William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech in which Faulkner said that long after the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and the last night has faded, there would still be one more sound, that of man's "puny inexhaustible voice still talking".

Faulkner then made this declaration:

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. 

And somehow the evening felt as much about hope as poetry, and I considered the fact that our puny inexhaustible voices can occasionally sound like music. I turned to my young friend who has been sad, and there we were together, and she smiled. Well, it was a wistful smile, but better.

Meanwhile people were lingering and chatting in the Book Loft way and when I stepped outside, the little lights of the shops at night reminded me of Christmas but it was springtime and the air was sweet and my own steps on the vacant sidewalks had the good solid sound of a person who is not lost, and has someone waiting for her at home. 

“It isn’t every day that the world arranges itself into a poem,” said Wallace Stevens.

True enough. But for a moment there, it did.